Quotes About Growth

What we have become is typically an assemblage of defense mechanisms and anxiety-management systems generated by the adaptive needs that our fate-fueled biographies bring to us.

None of us would admit to having "bad character," although we have all done bad things. In fact, a person who has never done anything "bad" will be a pretty superficial, infantile being, and that is a bad thing.

Where do you refuse to grow up, wait for certainty of wisdom before choosing, hope for solutions to emerge fully formed, expect rescue, or wait for a guru to make sense of it all for you?

Later—much later, if at all—we reluctantly come to recognize that those choices we made were reflective of our character, our limited field of vision, and our presumption that we knew enough to know enough.

Going through means that we have to experience what we not wish to experience, for to flee it is even worse.

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.' 145

Go into the fear, deal with it, lest you live a fugitive life.

Of each critical juncture of choice, one may usefully ask, "Does this path enlarge or diminish me?" Usually, we know the answer to the question. We know it intuitively, instinctively, in the gut. Choosing the path that enlarges is always going to mean choosing the path of individuation. The gods want us to grow up, to step up to that high calling that each soul carries as its destiny.

We have an entire culture of addictive treatment plans, of sensate distraction, and of jejune impatience that is driven by the preference of security through unconsciousness as an antidote to growth.

David McKay, 1900. Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929. Yeats, William Butler. A Vision

And thus fourthly, it only stands to reason, that the best thing we can do for ourselves and for the other is to assume more of the developmental agenda for ourselves.

The angst-driven search for external authority through fundamentalism is a flight from personal growth and development, an abdication of the summons to individual life.

It is only when we welcome such spirits and give them entrance that they may reveal themselves to us. When we open to ask what comes to us, why it has come, we may grow and be enlarged by the dialogue that emerges. When we deny them entrance, they do not go away. They go underground, persist, perseverate, and prevail.

for what we have most to share with them is not our learning or our techniques, but rather who we have become and what darkness we have faced in the world and in ourselves.

Solitude can be defined as learning that we are not alone when we are alone. When we have achieved the stature of solitude, namely achieving a conscious relationship with ourselves, then we are freer to share ourselves with others, freer to receive their gifts in return and not be infantilized by the mutual archaic agenda of childhood, the agenda that covertly uses the other to provide for us.

DURING THE COURSE of his long and distinguished career, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats often changed his themes, style, and personal philosophy, sometimes leaving behind the audience he had cultivated. When he was upbraided for this confusing constancy of change, he replied: The friends have it I do wrong Whenever I remake my song Should know what issue is at stake. It is myself that I remake. 54

We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.

Spiritual crises happen to us every day. Most of them are sufficiently low grade, devoid of enduring consequences, so we pay no attention and keep on rolling. A spiritual crisis occurs when our identity, our roles, our values, or our road map are substantially called into question, prove ineffective, or are overwhelmed by experience that cannot be contained by our understandings of self and world.

Either we die unto who we were, in order to move to the next stage, or we die through staying stuck, and suffer stasis and stultification.

Thus we are forced into a difficult choice—anxiety and depression. If we move forward, as our soul insists, we ... In such difficult choice one must choose anxiety, for anxiety at least is a path of potential growth; depression is a stagnation and defeat of life.

Imagine what our story would look like if, rather than succumbing to the insistent voices of family or culture, we determined that our vocation was to be a better human.

When you're living through it, though, especially when you are twelve and you think the whole world is changing until you realize it isn't the world, it's you, no piece seems little. It's all so big you think it can kill you. But it doesn't. Which is why the story goes on.

You think religions are constant things? inflexible and solid and form full-grown? Religions evolve. They grow out of a need, just like any other natural phenomenon, and they follow the same natural laws. They are born, grown, have sons, and illegitimate sons, and die.

the quickest, efficient, least expensive way to educate a man is to make it painful for him when he is wrong, the same as with any other animal.