Quotes About Growth

Resentment is one burden that is incompatible with your success. Always be the first to forgive; and forgive yourself first always.

Some things you can fix, and some things you can't. And I just think it is a shame to walk away from the things you can.

There's no going back from what happened. You can go back and understand the past, but you can't go back and change it.

What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest day; / Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn.

I've learned to be wary of those times when I think I know what I'm doing. I've discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue...

My newfound awareness was both gauntlet and gift. The choice wasn't to see it as one or the other. It was to embrace both.

Let the young soul look back upon its life and ask itself: what until now have you truly loved, what has raised up your soul, what ruled it and at the same time made it

One afternoon I opened an email from her that included a passage from the work of Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher and writer whom I had long admired. To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land.

I want to bless that young couple as they cross Union Square. I want to deliver some kind of benediction upon them as—drunk on love—they meander the narrow streets of Alphabet City. I want to suggest that there will come a time when they will need something more than love.

For years we had the persistent sensation in our life and art - John Updike's phrase - that we were just beginning.

think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be," wrote Joan Didion in her essay "On Keeping a Notebook," "whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, and who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

She'd also read up on neuroplasticity. Theo had always lagged behind, in terms of his emotional agility

I clung to the only story I could tolerate.

course, if you haven't received

Let me fall if I must fall. The one I will become will catch me." —THE BAAL SHEM TOV

They stay like this, two bodies so at home with each other that it is as if each of them had grown and shifted to accommodate the other's shape over the years, like two grafted trees.

They aren't there for posterity. Nor for reference. I don't believe the young woman who wrote them has anything to teach me. What does she know? She hasn't lived my life.

There is no such thing as a good decision and a bad decision. There are only decisions. Make them, fuck up, enjoy, repeat.

To grow one has to feel pain, know uneasiness - as you certainly must know from your work as a child psychiatrist. Isn't it more dangerous, more awful, when people don't feel the kinds of doubts and misgivings and confusions we've been talking about, when instead their voices are stifled by the permeating ideology, the official seductive presence of the state and the marketplace and the military machine?

If you always work with good, dedicated people, both above and below you, then you will learn to thrive in an environment of excellence.

The sweet spot: that productive, uncomfortable terrain located just beyond our current abilities, where our reach exceeds our grasp. Deep practice is not simply about struggling; it's about seeking a particular struggle, which involves a cycle of distinct actions.

repetition. "Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts," he wrote in The Wisdom of Wooden.

Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them—as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go—end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.

Although talent feels and looks predestined, in fact we have a good deal of control over what skills we develop, and we have more potential than we might ever presume to guess.