Quotes About Growth

To be an artist means: not to reckon and count; to ripen like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of Spring without fear lest no Summer might come after. It does come. But it comes only to the patient ones, who are there as if eternity lay in front of them, so unconcernedly still and far. I am learning it daily, learning it through pains to which I am grateful: patience is all!

And if what is close is far, then the space around you is wide indeed and already among the stars; take pleasure in your growth, in which no one can accompany you, and be kind-hearted towards those you leave behind, and be assured and gentle with them and do not plague them with your doubts or frighten them with your confidence or your joyfulness, which they cannot understand.

Where things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation.

Geben Sie jedes Mal sich und Ihrem Gefühl recht, (...) sollten Sie doch unrecht haben, so wird das natürliche Wachstum Ihres inneren Lebens Sie langsam und mit der Zeit zu anderen Erkenntnissen führen. Lassen Sie Ihren Urteilen die eigene stille, ungestörte Entwicklung, die, wie jeder Fortschritt, tief aus innen kommen muss und durch nichts gedrängt oder beschleunigt werden kann.

Live in these books for a while, learn from them what seems to be worth learning, but above all love them.

Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach den Antworten, die Ihnen nicht gegeben werden können, weil Sie sie nicht leben könnten. Und es handelt sich darum, alles zu leben. Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen. Vielleicht leben Sie dann allmählich, ohne es zu merken, eines fernen Tages in die Antwort hinein.

Darum können junge Menschen, die Anfänger in allem sind, die Liebe noch nicht: sie müssen sie lernen. Mit dem ganzen Wesen, mit allen Kräften, versammelt um ihr einsames, banges, aufwärts schlagendes Herz, müssen sie lieben lernen.

To love is also good, for love is hard. Love berween one person and another: that is perhaps the hardest thing it is laid on us to do, the utmost, the ultimate trial and test, the work for which all other work is just preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, do not yet know how to love: they must learn. With their whole being, with all their strength, concerted on their solitary fearful, upward beating hearts, they have to learn to love.

Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future, live into the answers.

How we waste our afflictions! We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance, hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year -- ; not only a season --: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.

Do not observe yourself too much. Do not draw too hasty conclusions from what happens to you; just let it happen. Otherwise, you start to look accusingly (that is, morally) upon your past, which is naturally involved in everything you now encounter. But whatever part of the errors, wishes, and desires of your boyhood is working in you, that is not what you remember and condemn.

Not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your old selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time.

But live you must, and you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phase.

Perhaps simple to be known, to be looked upon by so many people, to be the focal point of so many concentrating eyes, perhaps this was enough to make one different; enough to transform one into something else, someone else; just as by becoming and increasingly larger boy one became one day a man.

You start Saul, and end up Paul, my grandfather had often said. When you're a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul -- though you still Sauls around on the side.

Education Is All A Matter Of Building Bridges

But live you must, and you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phase. ? Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man . (Vintage International; 2nd edition March 14, 1995) Originally published 1952.

And he'll learn that his index and second fingers are meant for something other than playing the game of stink-finger and pulling his bow.

You start Saul, and end up Paul,' my grandfather had often said. 'When you're a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul – though you still Sauls around on the side.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.