Quotes About Growth

I felt I had stepped into something big and splendid, as if I had been a caterpillar walking into the heart of a red rose. I felt prim and small and petty. Until then I had never known what love meant.

Don't be a genius, my son, it isn't good for anybody.

The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find a face of his own.

For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipators.

Uncultivated minds are not full of wild flowers, like uncultivated fields. Villainous weeds grow in them, and they are full of toads.

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

Life continues, and we all of us keep changing and building, toward what we cannot know.

It's only by facing things that you ever put them behind you. -Mrs. McConnell to Susan

Karma isn't a punishment, it's a teaching aid. The idea behind reincarnation is that for most of us one lifetime isn't enough to learn all the spiritual lessons we're signed up for. Karma gives us a chance to retake the classes we flunk. If we mess things up in one lifetime, we're allowed to come back and experience a similar situation—maybe from another angle—so we can learn the lessons we didn't get the first time.

It's a time now of new beginnings.

Everyone needs time to develop their dreams. An egg in the nest doesn't become a bird overnight.

Today's problems are yesterday's mistakes coming back to bite you in the ass.

Mentoring at its very core is a learning relationship, and the phases I discuss and explore in this book are structures and processes that contribute to learning.

If you desire a man to tell you comfortable lies about your prowess, and so fetter any hope of true excellence, I'm sure you may find one anywhere. Not all prisons are made of iron bars. Some are made of feather beds.

If you ever have to make a choice between learning and inspiration, choose learning. It works more of the time.

When you can see the colors of the feathers, you'll also understand how you can expand your borders to infinity.

I've always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.

The demands of motherhood especially consume the old self, and replace it with something new, often better and wiser, sometimes wearier or disillusioned, or tense and terrified, certainly more self-knowing, but never the same again.

If you can't be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.

I've always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.

Some people grow into their dreams, instead of out of them.

Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.