Quotes About Growth

There will be a few times in your life, when the hardest lessons to learn are the ones your soul needs most.

The best revenge is to show them that your life is getting better after they're gone.

While we are reaching up for self-improvement, we also need to be the one some reach up to as well!

Have the responsibility to let young people know that you can make a mistake and come back from it.

Are you the happiest and saddest person right now that you've ever been? The fact is at this exact moment, you're the happiest and the saddest you've ever been in your whole life. Because every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment you are.

Be thankful for everything that happens in your life; We have to learn to be free. We have to, doesn't mean happy all the time, or okay all the time. It's okay not to be okay. I'm relearning it myself. But not being okay doesn't mean you stop living.

Stop fighting your circumstances." Start working on changing them.

Sometimes it takes looking back, for you to realize that leaving someone and the pain they were causing you, was the best decision you ever made.

Stop telling yourself the 'same crap, different day. Recognize that throughout this beautiful day, you have an incredible amount of opportunities to move your life into the direction you want it to go.

In the process of letting go you will lose many things from the past, but you will understand why everything in the past never worked.

I make mistakes like the next person. The only real mistake is the one from which I learned nothing.

If you want to give up what weighs you down. "Do what is right, "Accept yourself, love yourself, and keep moving forward.

In short, the greatest gift of relationship proves to be that as the result of encountering each other, we are obliged to grow larger than we had planned.

As the child once fantasized that its wishes governed the world, and the youth fantasized that heroism could manage to do it all, so the person in the second half of life is obliged to come to a more sober wisdom based on a humbled sense of personal limitations and the inscrutability of the world.

Thus we are forced into a difficult choice: anxiety or depression. If we move forward, as our soul insists, we may be flooded with anxiety. If we do not move forward, we will suffer the depression, the pressing down of the soul's purpose. In such a difficult choice one must choose anxiety, for anxiety is at least the path of personal growth; depression is a stagnation and defeat of life.

And how meaningful Beckett's admonition is to me today: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Rilke's paradoxical words also draw me onward still toward the unlived life that haunts all of us. Our task, he writes, is to be 'continuously defeated by ever-larger things.

the task is not to find the object115 but to live the journey, with passion, and risk, and commitment, and danger.

How scary it might prove to conclude that I am essentially alone in this summons to personal consciousness, that I cannot continue to blame others for what has happened to me, that I am really out there on that tightrope over the abyss, making choices every day, and that I am truly, irrevocably responsible for my life. That I would have to grow up, stand naked before this immense brutal universe, and step in to the largeness of this journey, my journey.

Growing up spiritually means that we are asked to sort through the possibilities for ourselves, find what resonates for us, what is confirmed by our experience not the consensus of others, and be willing to stand for what has proved true for us. For this reason, the twin tasks of finding personal authority and finding a mature spirituality are inextricably linked.

Physical death is only one form of dying. There are other forms of dying: We die whenever fear governs our choices. We die when we sacrifice growth for security. We die whenever we choose a convenient certainty over an inconvenient mystery.

If you want to cure a neurosis, you have to risk something."2

Only a spirituality that confesses that it knows not has a shot at growing, evolving, engaging the perils and uncertainties of the journey and of staying by our side when things get rough.

Jung once observed that we cannot grow up until we can see our parents as other adults, special to our biography certainly, wounded perhaps, but most of all simply other people who did or did not take on the largeness of their own journey. We have our own journey, for sure, and that is large enough to take us beyond our personal history toward our full potential.

The first half of life, at least for most of us, is essentially a giant, unavoidable mistake.