Quotes About Growth

Defeat is a school in which truth always grows strong.

Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.

It is part and parcel of every man's life to develop beauty in himself. All perfect things have in them an element of beauty.

A man is a great bundle of tools. He is born into this life without the knowledge of how to use them. Education is the process of learning their use.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

God uses suffering as a whetstone, to make men sharp with.

The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

Our best successes often come after our greatest disappointments.

Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

I used to think the Lord's Prayer was a short prayer; but as I live longer, and see more of life, I begin to believe there is no such thing as getting through it. If a man, in praying that prayer, were to be stopped by every word until he had thoroughly prayed it, it would take him a lifetime.

To the great tree-loving fraternity we belong. We love trees with universal and unfeigned love, and all things that do grow under them or around them — the whole leaf and root tribe.

Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.

Repentance may begin instantly, but reformation often requires a sphere of years.

Troubles are often the tools God fashions us for better things.

Yung man, don't grind yure scythe all on one side!

We are beginning to see that religion is not a spontaneous, self-protecting plant; that faith is not safely and wisely left to its own growth.

In the West Indies and South America, slaves were worked to death and replaced with fresh imports, but in the continental North American colonies of Great Britain the situation was the opposite. By about 1710, as Morgan notes, "Virginia's slave population began to grow from natural increase, an unprecedented event for any New World slave population.…In 1700 Virginia had 13,000 slaves; in 1730, 40,000; in 1750, 105,000, of whom nearly 80 percent were Virginia born.

The old self must die. He had always known it, but had so seldom acted it. He felt strangely glad that he was at the front. It was the only life; the only death.

Such was life; everything passed away; the fields and woodlands of boyhood became built upon; streets and pavements and lamp posts arose where warblers and willow wrens had sung; nothing ever remained the same.

either you are so underdeveloped that you can't see all that you can do, or you won't sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it...

How strange it was to think that he, who such a short time ago dared not believe in the happiness of her loving him, now felt unhappy because she loved him too much!

I think that in order to know love one must make a mistake and then correct it.