Quotes About Growth

It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours." —

The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves

The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.

You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.

Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination.

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.

You are the Hero of your own Story.

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. If we fix on the old, we get stuck. When we hang onto any form, we are in danger of putrefaction. Hell is life drying up.

The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)

The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.

Awe is what moves us forward.

Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something; it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.

If you travel far enough, you'll eventually meet yourself.

Marriage . . . is not a love affair; it is an ordeal. (92)

The best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself.

I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.

What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, in the fulfillment or the fiasco.

The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point; to shatter and annihilate that key knot of his limited existence.

If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them....You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted.... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.

Reading what you want, and having one book lead to the next, is the way I found my discipline.

In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship. You become mature when you become the authority of your own life. Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it. Awe is what moves us forward.

The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.