Quotes About Growth

Richard Cooper

Something needed to change - and fast. But it wasn't the world, government, or women that needed to change. It was me.

Women are born; men must be made.

The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.

In a designed economy there would be no trees, or certainly no very tall trees: no forests, no canopy. Trees are a waste. Trees are extravagant. Tree trunks are standing monuments to futile competition - futile if we think in terms of a planed economy. But the natural economy is not planned. Individual plants compete with other plants, of the same and other species, and the result is that they grow taller and taller, far taller than any planner would recommend.

agree with Nietzsche that 'The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously.' A joyful life is an active life – it is not a dull static state of so-called happiness. Full of the burning fire of enthusiasm, anarchic, revolutionary, energetic, daemonic, Dionysian, filled to overflowing with the terrific urge to create – such is the life of the man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness.

To recapitulate, the significance of the difference between growth and reproduction is that reproduction permits a new beginning, a new developmental cycle, and a new organism which may be an improvement, in terms of the fundamental organization of complex structure, over its predecessor.

My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.' We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would.

it is ultimately these mistakes that make evolution possible.

Life can be difficult and no one escapes its challenges. Sooner or later you will find yourself pressed to your limits. It may come in the form of a broken relationship, or unemployment, or a serious illness, or the death of a loved one. When it comes you will be tempted to define your life by that painful experience. Don't succumb to that temptation. Refuse to define your life by any single event, whatever it may be. Its a real part of your life, but that is all--just a part.

Adversity brings out the best in us ... It's everyday living that does us in.

They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet. Beneath

They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet.

The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs.

Pushing away, pushing in: the pattern of so much that was to follow.

I am a part of all that I have met.

All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life.

When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what's in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again--which is a loss. But to shield yourself--as I didn't do--seems to be an even greater error, since what's lost is the truth of your parents' life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in.

You survived. Whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger, right?" I don't, of course, believe this. Most things that don't kill us right off, kill us later.

entering the past is a precarious business, since the past strives but always half-fails to make us who we are.

to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen...

sharing the future with someone would certainly mean that repetitions had to be managed more skillfully.

Unbridled commerce isn't generally pretty, but it's always forward-thinking.

Todos somos partes de la tierra; algunos estamos destinados a ser grandes afluentes y a guiar las aguas por el terreno, alimentándolo y haciéndolo crecer. Algunos somos montañas que vigilan las fronteras de las naciones, protegiendo a las personas inocentes de los planes de los invasores. Y algunos de nosotros no somos más que flores, con un breve lapso para crecer a la luz del sol antes de morir.