Quotes About Growth

We each of us have it within to make ourselves over, if we choose to do so. Most of us not only do not try, but don't even acknowledge that ability to ourselves.

Fear holds us and binds us and keeps us from growing, Nicholas." Pug's voice took on an insistent quality. "It kills a small piece of us each day. It holds us to what we know and keeps us from what's possible, and it is our worst enemy. Fear doesn't announce itself; it's disguised, and it's subtle. It's choosing the safe course; most of us feel we have 'rational' reasons to avoid taking risks.

for to change anything in your past would risk turning you into less than you are now.

He'll get over it,' said his father. 'But to speed it along, he needs to know that pain will come. The knack is to not engage the pain, not hold on to it like a treasured thing, but to simply let it pass through and wait until it's gone. It will come less frequently and after a time, be gone.

But the real test of honor for a man is to live and learn to love himself.

Raymond E. Feist

Les arbres poussaient en silence et le règne animal limitait sa présence à des actes obscurs et muets.

But a father is more than a person, he's in fact a society, the thing you grow up into.

When you go out first on your own. When you marry and settle. When your father dies. When your son leaves home.

Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institution, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land.

I don't only act out of my character; my character reacts to my actions. Each time I why, even if I'm not caught, I become a little bit more of this ugly thing: a liar. Character is always in the making, with each morally valenced action, whether right or wrong, affecting our characters, the people who we are.

Every morning I had to force myself to leave the apartment, so dark and protected, its walls lined with books. I stared longingly at the few English titles scattered among them. No, I'd tell myself sternly, you will not sit in an apartment in Rome reading William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. Get out there and have some experiences for yourself, religious or otherwise. And I'd push myself out into the relentless noise and glare.

Genius in a person was like weed that takes over the entire garden, that won't allow anything else to grow. (p. 251)

Family traditions that hinder your ability to love, understand, and succeed are false—they

Albert Einstein once stated: "The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." It is not until we understand our limited thinking that we can choose to alter it and ourselves.

As you work to understand your emotions—including those of the family members who came before you—and put together the pieces of your past that have made you who you are, your healing will begin.

As the saying goes, "If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got." If we're finding it hard to fulfill our needs, there's something within us (most likely a thought process or belief governed by fear) that needs to change so that we can create a different reality.

People don't grow old. When they stop growing, they become old.

If there is anything natural and inevitable about the aging process, it cannot be known until the chains of our old beliefs are broken.

by uncovering the illusions and finding the gifts they've masked, we can grow, and begin to feel more love and gratitude for our relatives. This is the true healing process.

when you allow yourself to release the burdens caused by other people's abuses and addictions. Because these aren't your fault, it's not necessary to carry them forever. Forgive and take responsibility by choosing to learn and grow from your trials and deciding to move forward in spite of them.

Oh, to be half as wonderful as my children thought I was when he was small, and only half as stupid as my teenager now thinks I am.

What Walter thinks is that people are like rivers. We never stay in the same place but jest keep flowing along, learning new stuff and picking up new experiences and changing all the time. So today's you isn't the same as yesterday's you and won't be the same as tomorrow's you. But Walter also thinks that there's a real perfect you that you're always trying to get to, and the better you are at living your life, the closer you come to it.

How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you? (Plato) The things we want are transformative, and we don't know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration- how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?