Quotes About Growth

I didn't want to play a lawyer. I didn't want to play a doctor. I didn't want to play a single dad. I wanted to do something I felt I could learn from, something that would be a challenge and something that would not dry up.

Life Begins at Forty.

Confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom.

Confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom; youth is the season of credulity.

The atrocious crime of being a young man, which the honorable gentleman [Walpole] has with such spirit and decency charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny; but content myself with wishing that I may be one of those whose follies may cease with their youth, and not of that number who are ignorant in spite of experience.

An obstacle is often a stepping stone.

Nature takes away any faculty that is not used.

One of the many insights of Carl Rogers was that when people feel unacceptable they are immobilized, unable to change. It is, paradoxically, when people experience acceptance that they are freed to change.

If you treat an individual as he is, he will stay as he is, but if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

In their confluence, these complex therapeutic skills may over time become a simpler way of being.

developing compassion: There is a developmental process for cultivating compassion for others. . . . The first step is knowledge. . . . Then you need to constantly reflect and internalize this knowledge . . . to the point where it will become a conviction. It becomes integrated into your state of mind. . . . Then you get to a point where it becomes spontaneous. (The Dalai Lama & Ekman, 2008, pp.

The whole of nature, as has been said, is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and in the passive.

There is no law of progress. Our future is in our own hands, to make or to mar. It will be an uphill fight to the end, and would we have it otherwise Let no one suppose that evolution will ever exempt us from struggles. 'You forget,' said the Devil, with a chuckle, 'that I have been evolving too.'

Faith begins as an experiment and ends as an experience.

There are two ways to get to the top of an oak tree: You can sit on an acorn and wait for it to grow, or you can climb the tree.

To deny sex is to deny life. To reject art is to impoverish yourself, rejecting pleasure and growth. To accept sex and art together is to add to oneself, to be positive instead of negative. Erotic cinema . . . reveals us to ourselves with increasing artistry.

The stories of young men searching for their fathers are the stories of young men who through their adventures father themselves by doing for themselves what they hoped a father would do for them. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")

evolution propels itself by an inclination toward its next probable achievement." ("Desire")

Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.

He knows not his own strength who hath not met adversity.

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

If there is one true statement true of every living person it must be this: he hasn't achieved his full potential.

We must be careful not to create our own fetters or our own inflexibility.