Quotes About Growth

The important and only vital question is, how much greater, finer, am I than I was yesterday? Have I fulfilled my possibilities, made the most of my potentialities. What a marvelous world if all would, could hold this attitude toward life.34

Pain nourishes courage. You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you.

You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you.

Take chances, make mistakes. That's how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

That image of the countryside being a threatening place still exists. People continue to resist the challenge of learning about aspects of life they don't understand.

He who devotes sixteen hours a day to hard study may become at sixty as wise as he thought himself at twenty.

There are other kinds of damage, to the people in your life, to your sense of who you are and what you can do, to your future

What a child knows about transformation is very little. What an adult knows, I think, is even less. Because a child at least remembers that transformation is possible.

Step One is, paradoxically, both a crushing end and a beginning.

Self-knowledge is the foundation of a practical spirituality, a spirituality that ripples outward from the self into the world.

Whether one believes that transformation is effected by the will of an outer force, or the willingness of an inner self, does not change the reality of transformation as a phenomenon of spiritual experience. All we need to know is that it does occur. We have proof of that; we have our living, breathing, ever-expanding spiritual selves.

The reward is entrance to the "world of the Spirit," which is to say, entrance to this world, a place at this table, in this human life. I am not much concerned about the existence of a hereafter, a "next" life—this life is what I have, this is where I live, and I believe that my spiritual growth depends upon the work I do here and now. That work amounts to seeing this world clearly, moving through it gently, and learning to love it well.

For all its God language, the Twelve Step program isn't actually an attempt at religious conversion. Really, it just tries to bring us to a place of new spiritual understanding that allows us to live differently in this world.

The process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth.

Art is a process, not a product.

I do urge you to welcome children. Even one child will make a difference in your life that you cannot fathom. I promise you, my girl.

instead I honestly feel lucky sometimes that I have gotten to feel and experience things that others have to struggle longer and harder to learn.

Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading.

The end of reading development doesn't exist; the unending story of reading moves ever forward, leaving the eye, the tongue, the word, the author for a new place from which the "truth breaks forth, fresh and green," changing the brain and the reader every time.

Who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria37 of experiences, information, books we have read.

Como santo Tomás de Aquino, concibo el desacuerdo como el lugar donde «el hierro con hierro se afila».

This morning, when I got my mail there's concrete all over the ground cement, you know and these little clovers the little green clovers, like from St. Patrick's Day the plant were growing up out of the cement no dirt and no nothing and no rain and there they were, growing up out of the cement, and I was thinking "that's like me."

I'm really proud of you for having come this far every single one of you, wherever you are, you're on your way you are getting there! And don't worry so much! Just that's what we need to stop doing stop worrying so much, and start observing a little bit more.