Quotes About Growth

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Wisdom that isn't distilled in our own crucible can't help

These mental lessons were the most difficult of all. I was never sure whether I mastered them or not. If I asked the bow, it would only say, frustratingly, 'There's more to learn. Because a trained mind is your strongest ally—and an untrained one your worst enemy.

Bushes would pull in their sharp thorns and burst into flower when I watered them or loosened the earth around their roots. Squirrel-like creatures, their long white hair smooth as silk-thread, would scurry up to take berries from my palm.

I knew now that love—no matter how deep—wasn't enough to transform another person: how they thought, what they believed. At best, we could only change ourselves.

Things are breaking down inside of her. She waits to see if she can build new, satisfying shapes from them.

now I sometimes wonder if it might not have been the most worthwhile of the skills I learned on the island.

Weeping is not bad. It clears out the heart, making space in it for growth.

She feels a certain pity when she thinks of that time, that self. Such an earnest wife-self, wanting so much, her stance one of perpetual leaning forward, as though perfection was a town just a little farther down the road. She didn't know then that perfection had nothing to do with happiness.

After that, somehow, I began fixing things in my life. Dr Berger says being close to death will do that, but I'm not sure catalysts of change can be so easily identified.

She would learn over the next years that love can feel a lot of different ways, and sometimes it can hurt a lot more.

I didn't realize—until this earthquake, until today—that my withholding was a worse kind of betrayal, a betrayal of the self. It was time for me to change.

I knew now that love - no matter how deep - wasn't enough to transform another person: how they thought, what they believed. At best, we could only change ourselves.

I pondered the word endure, what it meant. It didn't mean giving in. It didn't mean being weak or accepting injustice. It meant taking the challenges thrown at us and dealing with them as intelligently as we knew until we grew stronger than them. That was what I'd work on.

Let the past go. Be at ease. Allow the future to arrive at its own pace, unfurling its secrets when it will.

much. I knew now that love—no matter how deep—wasn't enough to transform another person: how they thought, what they believed. At best, we could only change ourselves.

Every person is evolving, and evolution implies process, time and mistakes.6 Once a person realizes that everybody makes mistakes and that this is part of the natural process of spiritual evolution, forgiving others and also one's self becomes easy. Once there is forgiveness, inner healing and physical healing occur.

Meditating regularly is like being fertilized. Throw the fertilizer on the ground and whatever is in the ground - either good or bad seeds - will grow. Everything, whether vice or virtue, is magnified. Unless a person in the spiritual path practices character-building, (s)he may tend to become worse.

It could manifest and grow like seeds planted throughout your life, so that life itself becomes the guru. The idea is that life becomes the teacher all the time. This seems to be one of the very important messages of Milarepa's life.

Pain is the best instructor, but no one wants to go to his class.

My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older brother's homework in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes. By the time I was 10, I was reading Orwell, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and the Koran. I was reading comic books too.

The first stage in a technology's advance is that it'll fall below a critical price. After it falls below a critical price, it will tend, if it's successful, to rise above a critical mass, a penetration.

Surround yourself with talent and be merciless.

We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven.