Quotes About Growth

We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.

Generally, it's better to understand that change is a matter of patience and persistence, setbacks and renewed effort, rather than sudden perfection.

There is no such way to attain to greater measures of grace, as for a man to live up to that little grace he has.

Such as have made a considerable improvement of their gifts and graces, have hearts as large as their heads; whereas most men's heads have outgrown their hearts.

I]t is not hasty reading--but serious meditating upon holy and heavenly truths, that make them prove sweet and profitable to the soul. It is not the bee's touching of the flower, which gathers honey--but her abiding for a time upon the flower, which draws out the sweet. It is not he who reads most--but he who meditates most, who will prove the choicest, sweetest, wisest and strongest Christian.

It is not the bee's touching of the flower that gathers honey, but her abiding for a time upon the flower that draws out the sweet. It is not he that reads most, but he that meditates most, that will prove the choicest, sweetest, wisest and strongest Christian.

An Oriental smile is not an affair of a swift moment. It has a birth and a beginning. It awakes--hesitates--grows, and at last from the sad chrysalis emerges the butterfly.

I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind & my eyes, refusing to be stamped & stereotyped. The thing is to free ones self; to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded. (Diary 4: 187)

Education is mostly about institutions and getting tickets stamped; learning is what we do for ourselves. When we're lucky, they go together. If I had to choose, I'd take learning.

Interstate commerce grew so rapidly that hundreds of local clock conventions had to be replaced by a national system of standardized time in 1883.

When congregations hold passive views of human responsibility, the evidence is that they are not growing. If some teaching claims to be the Gospel but does nothing in response, does not elicit any compassionate action, then it is surely not the Gospel. The fantasy of a gospel that does nothing is not the good news of the New Testament.

I now understand that I would never have been able to become a plausible critic of the absurdities of modern consciousness until I myself had experienced them. I did not become an orthodox believer or theologian until after I tried out most of the errors long rejected by Christianity. If my first forty years were spent hungering for meaning in life, the last forty have been spent in being fed. If the first forty were prodigal, the last forty have been a homecoming.

Big Truth, once understood and assimilated, always modifies your intent, and invariably leads to personal change.

All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.

The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

Experience is the best of schoolmasters, only the school fees are heavy

The block of granite, which was an obstacle in the path of the weak, becomes a stepping stone in the path of the strong.

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May but at length the season of summer does come.

You don't want to be great to start anything like business or any other but you will become great once you started

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

No pressure, no diamonds.