Quotes About Growth

The way we view God does not change God, but it changes us and how we relate to him.

It is impossible to be spiritually mature when we are emotionally unhealthy.

True humility requires inner strength to face the truth about ourselves and to receive undeserved favor from a loving God who longs to reconcile people to himself and help them grow.

you cannot change something you will not face.

Life is like a school; one can learn, one can graduate, one can skip a grade or stay behind.

Creativity builds upon the public domain. The battle that we're fighting now is about whether the public domain will continue to be fed by creative works after their copyright expires. That has been our tradition but that tradition has been perverted in the last generation. We're trying to use the Constitution to reestablish what has always been taken for granted--that the public domain would grow each year with new creative work.

When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.

The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty -- and vice versa.

I think I am at the end of a certain phase of my life. What I'm on the lookout for now is the unexpected, for things that come from outside and that I never thought might happen. Sometimes you have to watch for them so you don't automatically say no to the new, simply because you're in the habit of saying no to everything that comes along.

Every child has the capacity to be everything.

If what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think in a year will be different again.

It was all nonsense to see things in terms of peaks and crises: the personal events, like the public ones, were long-term affairs, after all. They built up.... It is after--at least months, but it is usually years--that a person will say, My God, my whole life has changed, talking about a passion of love or hate, a marriage, a testing job of work. My life has changed because I have changed.

But we do not reach truth unless we allow ourselves to be exposed to and drawn by a truth which is beyond our present understanding.

I was then a young and omniscient student (alas, I was soon to lose both these virtues).

Each was changed in himself, and yet each thought the other only changed, himself the same.

Once set a strong mind thinking, and you have done all that it needs for its education.

They tell me I must bruise The rose's leaf, Ere I can keep and use Its fragrance brief. They tell me I must break The skylark's heart, Ere her cage song will make The silence start. They tell me love must bleed, And friendship weep, Ere in my deepest need I touch that deep. Must it be always so With precious things? Must they be bruised and go With beaten wings? Ah, yes! by crushing days, By caging nights, by scar Of thorn and stony ways, These blessings are!

Every difficulty and every temptation that comes our way, if we receive it correctly, is God's opportunity.

So suffering is rough and hard to bear; but it hides beneath it discipline, education, possibilities, which not only leave us nobler, but perfect us to help others.

Poverty, hardship and misfortune have pressed many a life to moral heroism and spiritual greatness. Difficulty challenges energy and perseverance. It calls into activity the strongest qualities of the soul.

We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.

If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so.

He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.

The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.