Quotes About Growth

After all, this is how you learned how to walk. You didn't just jump up from your crib one day and waltz gracefully across the room. You stumbled and fell on your face and got up and tried again. At what age are you suddenly expected to know everything and never make any more mistakes? If you can love and respect yourself in failure, worlds of adventure and new experiences will open up before you, and your fears will vanish.

You must first consider that a human life is an ongoing process that involves a constantly changing physical body as well as an enormous number of rapidly changing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Your life therefore is an evolving experience, a continual flow. You are not a thing; that's why any label is constricting, highly inaccurate, and global.

It is okay to be flawed and defective, or even wonderful

The most loving women are the women who will test you the most. She wants you to be your fullest, most magnificent self. She won't settle for anything less. She knows it is true of you. She knows in your deepest heart you are free, you are Shiva. Anything less than that she will torment. And, as you know, she's quite good at it.

But if we are truly happy inside, then age brings with it a maturity, a depth, and a power that only magnifies our radiance.

Your fear is the sharpest definition of your self. You should know it. You should feel it virtually constantly. Fear needs to become your friend, so that you are no longer uncomfortable with it.

Every moment of your life is either a test or a celebration

Your only real choices are to open fully and receive their gifts or crucify them and be relieved of their force...But you must be willing to feel your heart's terrors and wounds or else you will close and protect yourself, striking back at the source of openness you most yearn to become...

Ongoing passion and growth in intimacy requires us to let go of our ideas of what we "should" be doing and instead trust the wisdom inherent in our unguarded heart and uninhibited body.

But after children leave their parents' arms, school is still the necessary place for knowledge and soul to spring into life and good teachers are still the instigators of that miracle.

If you don't read books, and if you don't get consumed by the physical and moral life of men and women in fiction and history, too many facets of yourself may never come into being.

The most important of all limitations on knowledge – creation is that we cannot prophecy: we cannot predict the content of ideas yet to be created, or their effects. This limitation is not only consistent with the unlimited growth of knowledge, it is entailed by it.

Perhaps a more practical way of stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge (all knowledge, not only scientific) as a continual transition from problems to better problems, rather than from problems to solutions or from theories to better theories. This

This is what we can achieve when, as Feynman said, we keep learning more about how not to fool ourselves.

there is only one way of making progress: conjecture and criticism

One of the consequences of optimism is that one expects to learn from failure – one's own and others'.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.

What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same.

They are 'universal constructors'.

Children are amazing, and while I go to places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, and of course I teach at Columbia, NYU, and that's nice and I love students, but the most fun of all are the real little ones, the young ones.

I had a fear that I'd be typecast, but I don't really have that fear anymore.

I may be learning guitar, but I'll never be able to sing.

Will you never grow up?" "I doubt it, and I certainly hope not.

Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.