Quotes About Growth

Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Do not follow the ancient masters, seek what they sought.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, we become our choices.

To Hear the Falling World Only if I move my arm a certain way, it comes back. Or the way the light bends in the trees this time of year, so a scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart. I carry this in my body, seed in an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe. But they guard me, these small pains, from growing sure of myself and perhaps forgetting.

Optimism More and more I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true. But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.

In a human-sized room, someone is setting a human-sized table, with yellow napkins, someone is calling her children to come in from a day whose losses as yet remain child-sized.

However many holes are in you, always there's room for another. However much you carry, you can hold more. "My Corkboard

So let's allow ourselves to imagine that the attention and love we give our grandchildren can help them grow and eventually help to mend our troubled world.

Mindful of the boundaries between us and our grown children, we make the effort to take the differences between us less personally

Unconditional love is the magic bridge that spans the generations: we love them unconditionally, and they love us back without reservations. It's a two-way experience. It grows the children and gentles the grandparents.

The elder generation may also take the opportunity to grow. Becoming a grandparent is the crowning event for many people, so why should it present a challenge? Because the rules are about to change, and promoting harmony in the family under new circumstances takes patience and modesty. It requires that the elder generation adopt a long view.

Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow.

None of us were perfect, and life made us infinitely less so. Tears

long and prosper

if you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always gotten

That everything that happens can be converted to good. We simply do not know the good of it, our world being so vast and wide and us but a small part in it

Thinking if only I had done something differently, the accident wouldn't have happened. But that's what accidents are, for the most part: unplanned. We can only imagine how to pick up the pieces and wing anew through the sky, reaching higher.

Tut! Magic, indeed! As if there weren't marvels enough without magic. Pictures traveling by telephone, and men bouncing up and down on the moon? Trees and floors and children growing? There are your real marvels.

Well, then why should we do anything more than once? Should I just smoke this one cigarette? Maybe we should only have sex once, if it's the same thing. Should we just watch one sunset? Or live just one day? Because it's new every time. Each time is a different experience.

but to refire into new life. (5) We choose to interpret all the physical, intellectual, emotional, social, and spiritual changes as new territory to traverse in our advancement. (6) We choose to see this aging process as our final pilgrimage—the one that will ultimately lead us to our Beloved, our Source. (7) We willingly and eagerly invite others to come with us and to help them along, just as we allow them to help us reach our sacred destination of heaven.

A traumatic event doesn't doom us to suffer indefinitely. Instead, we can use it as a springboard to unleash our best qualities and lead happier lives.

Our siblings push buttons that cast us in roles we felt sure we had let go of long ago — the baby, the peacekeeper, the caretaker, the avoider.... It doesn't seem to matter how much time has elapsed or how far we've traveled.

Our siblings push buttons that cast us in roles we felt sure we had let go of long ago - the baby, the peacekeeper, the caretaker, the avoider.... It doesn't seem to matter how much time has elapsed or how far we've traveled.

These children learn to adapt to life rather than learning how to live their lives.