Quotes About Growth

We do not let go of control on our own. Usually, something has to happen that shows us incontrovertibly that we are not in control. From this condition of bankrupt ego, we finally let go. Great losses are thus necessary losses like the discarded sandbags that lighten a balloon so it can ascend higher.

We go mad to become sane sometimes.

As we become more courageous, getting on with life becomes more valuable than the narcotic comforts of the status quo.

anything that crosses swords with our entitled ego is a powerful source of transformation and inner evolution.

success in managing fear prevents us from ever facing it fully. Surrender to it ventilates our souls so that fear becomes an old pickpocket who has lost his skill to steal from us. How ironic that our ego lives in dread of such a surrender! Avoiding it annuls its arrival today, but it keeps coming back, subpoena in hand. Here we fear what would free us. So we lose when we win. The same applies to the Void. To avoid is to win but lose. Facing our Void is all that will free us from it. One

While certain partners may hurt us, they cannot undo the abiding trust that we continue to carry so steadfastly toward the human world. We become able to hold others with a relaxed grasp, not compulsively or coercively as if we needed to hold on for dear life. Buddhist writer Stephen T. Butterfield wrote, "Since no relationship can be made entirely safe and secure . . . this has to mean trust in one's own ability to use any consequence, including betrayal, as a means for waking up.

Then we become more adult, because we are fulfilling the inner urge that all humans were born with: to go on a heroic journey, to move on rather than stay stuck. Where we are is not our fate. It is where we can best begin the journey.

It took just such evil and painful things for the great emancipation to occur," Nietzsche said. He is also the one who said that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

The path to a higher power than ego is saying yes to the predicament

To love is to become loving.

A declaration of our own history of trust is essential in understanding ourselves and in growing in intimacy with our partner.

The very best of high school still can't compete with the glory of any ordinary summer.

They need leaders who help them shine, who help them fulfill their potential at work.

One of the difficulties of stretching ourselves is that we tend to see ourselves as our limitations, not as our potential. We're lost in our own world.

testing out models, and then refining everything further, I developed a set of ideas that was transforming people's ability

I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education.

Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you're not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were.

God made your body, mind, and soul. And He isn't done with you; He is still making you. God is making you braver, stronger, purer, more peaceful, more loving, less selfish - the kind of person you've perhaps always wanted to be.

out here in "the real world," every day was sort of like the one before. I guess that's why people freaked out about birthdays: Those at least put a stake in the ground, somehow ended one chapter and opened a next.

I believe we have two lives. The life we learn with, and the life we live with after that.

didn't even know that Dani knew Laurie and Andy. My instinct is to complain about this; I hate when people pay attention to my birthday. I especially hate when people do things behind my back, even when they are well-intentioned. But I don't want to be an asshole; Dani went out of her way to do something nice. It's going to happen anyway, so there's nothing to be gained by acting like my normal, idiotic self. It's possible I may be maturing.

In America, air conditioning made possible the economic prosperity of the New South. Without it, cities like Atlanta, Houston, and New Orleans would still be sleepy-time towns.

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insolvable problems.

the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, . . . it all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany, . . . formless, has no terrible & no beautiful condensation.