Quotes About Growth

But the point about spiritual fruit is that, however healthy the tree, it has to be looked after.

You could get crickets to pop out of a book as a little, little girl, but now you have to relearn it? Well, children can do so many things until they're told they can't.

If you're a Christian you're just a shadow of your future self.

I've met people in the last year or two who have stopped going to their local church because people have started singing new songs and dancing in the aisles. And I've met others who have started going for precisely the same reason. It's time to give ourselves a shake--to recognize that different people need different kinds of help at different stages of their lives--and get on with it.

We have to grow into Scripture, like a young boy inheriting his older brother's clothes and flopping around in them, but he gradually builds out and grows up. Perhaps it's a measure of our maturity when parts of Scripture that we found odd or even repellent suddenly come up in a new light. Our sense is overtaken by a sense of the whole thing, wide, multicolored, and unspeakably powerful.

The future goal is the thing which produces character in the present.

Successful resistance to temptation may result in an increase of moral muscle, but that is because one is going to need it. A temptation resisted may become more, not less, fierce.

It is true, then, that as soon as someone becomes a Christian, he or she can and must say `Our Father'; that is one of the marks of grace, one of the first signs of faith. But it will take full Christian maturity to understand, and resonate with, what those words really mean.

The garden is far less likely to grow weeds if we have been planting flowers.

Perhaps, indeed, that is what "holy scripture" really is — not a calm, serene list of truths to be learned or commands to be obeyed, but a jagged book that forces you to grow up in your thinking as you grapple with it.

How would you describe a mature person?

Private spiritual growth and ultimate salvation come rather as the byproducts of the main, central, overarching purpose for which God has called and is calling us.

Paul does of course want the young Christians to develop to the point where, as mature followers of Jesus Christ, they will gradually find that the Christian habits of heart and life "come naturally." But to get to that point they must learn

The vine-dresser is never closer to the vine, taking more thought over its long-term health and productivity, than when he has the knife in his hand. JOHN

If you desire ease, forsake learning.

Loving a child doesn't mean giving in to all his whims; to love him is to bring out the best in him, to teach him to love what is difficult.

I believe that you should gravitate to people who are doing productive and positive things with their lives.

It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women--a new job, a new town, a divorce--which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long, slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; something by which they may be so taken up that the practical outward changes of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal, or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves.

If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.

Il faut se séparer, il faut se couper non seulement de l'être aimé, mais de tout ce qui a été notre vie jusque-là, notre bien-être, notre chez-soi, notre vie calme et sans histoires. Sans cette coupure radicale, sans cette séparation douloureuse, le nouveau feu ne jaillira pas. Nous resterons près de la terre.

En réalité, chacun de tes ennemis est ton remède, ton élixir, ton bienfaiteur, ton vrai ami. Car tu t'enfuis de lui et tu implores Dieu. En revanche, tes amis sont des ennemis. Car, en t'occupant, ils t'éloignent de la présence divine.

The implication of this is that the mind's possibilities are limited by its concept of its potential.

Our memories make us... even the darkest of them all.

The longer you live, the more mistakes you make. And the more sorrows you carry.