Quotes About Growth

He'd been a great one for looking for greener pastures. He'd kept looking until all his pastures were brown with time.

as Huxley put it-'to sit down before fact as a little child—be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatsoever abysses nature leads.

Non c'è da stupirsi che i bambini sono felici. Per loro la vita è facile. Un po' di fame un po', un po' di freddo, un po' di paura del buio. Tutto qui. Perché affannarsi tanto a crescere? La vita diventa troppo complicata.

There's nothing wrong with civilization. We're just no there yet.

remember that the doubts you may feel today will be the issues you'll be confidently dissecting tomorrow.

If you should prefer to understand that children are those human beings who have not yet found the grasp of their own minds, then the task you have given yourself, that task of rearing a child wisely and well, is suddenly transformed from indoctrination to education, in its truest sense, and made not only possible but even likely--provided, to be sure, one little prerequisite, which is that you are not a child, that you have come into the grasp of your own mind.

I have to confess that, in the years I have spent as a schoolteacher, I have learned much more from my students than they have from me. While that will surely sound like a feigned humility, it isn't feigned, and it isn't humility either.

If we think only the thoughts that are customary to us, and listen only to the words of those who are of our mind, we are little likely to find refreshment and renewal in our minds, and thus all too likely to suppose that we have come to the end of all deliberations that we have to make.

Child-rearing is not some special part of life, set aside for some temporary purpose and put aside at a certain age. It is the principal business of life, the search for the condition that is naturally promised for us by the fact of our life. And we must do it by ourselves, one by one.

This was something Grandma Tilly couldn't understand---how war promises a boy it can make a man out of him.

The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you

Are all my memories true? Every word, and growing truer with the years.

I was getting long in the leg but still short on experience.

A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel --root and stem--in a great U-turn until it rights itself. But a human child can know it's pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.

A tree is a passage between earth and sky.

The fraction of an ounce of beechnut now weighs more than she does. But the soil weighs just what it did, minus an ounce or two. There's no other explanation: almost all the tree's mass has come from the very air.

The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing—nothing at all, and do it for less time than you might think.

Every belief will be outgrown, in time. The first lesson of the universe is to never reason from only a single instance. Unless you only have one instance. In which case: find another.

Nine is the age of great turning. Maybe humanity was a nine-year-old, not yet grown up, not a little kid anymore. Seemingly in control, but always on the verge of rage.

She takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground. There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

Trees fall with spectacular crashes. Planting is silent and growth invisible.

The prose can be brutally beautiful. But the semester starts, you fall in love, get deflowered, watch Kennedy die and the Beatles invade, get high to listen to Coltrane, and discover Heller, Ellison, Ferlighetti, and Bellow -- writing that flows across the page in huge bright swaths that you didn't know English could permit.

Thick, clotted, craggy, but solid on the earth, and covered in other living things. Three hundred years growing, three hundred years holding, three hundred years dying. Oak.

Insecurity will always be a growth industry. The economy now depends on fear.