Quotes About Growth

Running away from uncertainty and confusion but most of all running away from myself. I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.

In fact, there are more than two chances - many more. I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.

Our memories change as we do.

It has taken me a long time to learn how to love - both the giving and the receiving.

That night, I knew I would get away, better myself. Not because I despised who I was, but because I did not know who I was. I was waiting to be invented. I was waiting to invent myself.

For myself I will plant a cypress tree and it will outlive me. That's what I miss about the fields, the sense of the future as well as the present. That one day what you plant will spring up unexpectedly; a shoot, a tree, just when you were looking the other way, thinking about something else. I like to know that life will outlive me, that's a happiness Bonaparte never understood.

Ti do un consiglio: quando sei giovane e ti capita di leggere qualcosa che non ti piace affatto, mettilo da parte e rileggilo tra tre anni dopo. Se ancora non ti piace, rileggilo dopo altri tre anni. E quando sei giovane - quando arrivi ai cinquant'anni come me - rileggerai il libro che ti è piaciuto in assoluto di meno.

This is the city of disguises. What you are one day will not constrain you on the next. You may explore yourself freely and, if you have wit or wealth, no one will stand in your way. This city was built on wit and wealth and we have a fondness for both, though they do not have to appear in tandem.

The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.

Spring is about beginning again, and beginning again can be so much harder than staying in the winter of your life. What do you need to do this spring? What needs to begin again? What ground needs to be prepared? What needs to be planted? What needs to be swept away, because it's done? What new life is here? What will be different, this time?

When I was born, I became the visible corner of a folded map. The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first first coordinate. There is a lot you can't change when you are kid. But you can pack for the journey.

Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and mostly without fail. We don't know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo Sapiens. Who's kidding whom?

Among the many short cuts to science, we badly need someone to teach us the art of learning with difficulty.

The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning.

La jeunesse est le temps d'étudier la sagesse; la vieillesse est le temps de la pratiquer.

Sors de l'enfance, ami, revéille-toi!

Hasta entonces me había hablado de mí solo, como a un niño; desde aquel momento empezó a tratarme como a un hombre, y me habló de sí misma. Me

L'adversité sans doute est un grand maître, mais il fait payer cher ses leçons, et souvent le profit qu'on en retire ne vaut pas le prix qu'elles ont coûté.

Quit thy childhood, my friend, and wake up!

The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning. They are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man.

Si hay que permitir a ciertos hombres el librarse al estudio de las ciencias y de las artes, es a aquellos que tengan fuerzas para andar solos en su busca y para adelantarlas. A

The great secret of education is to use exercise of mind and body as relaxation one to the other.

Your beginning, he said to me, is the rule of what will be required of you: seek to behave so as to do more afterwards, but watch out never to do less.

To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.