Quotes about Personal Growth

I am the soul stretching into the furthest reaches of my fingers and beyond from "Last Words," The New Yorker , Poems: December 13, 1982 Issue.

The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is.

What's in front of you is a whole world of experiences beyond your imagination. Put yourself, and your growth and development, first.

I hate that phrase: move on. Like no matter what happened or what you did, you just "move on," and that's supposed to make everything all right.

Most people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it's just a bookshelf.

There were times, in the beginning, when I used my journal as a wailing wall, but I learned not to immortalize the darkness. Rereading it was counterproductive. What I needed was a place in which to collect the light.

I'm social and I meet people and talk to people but I'm not looking for the ideal person to fit my mold and to raise my family with yet. I'm just kind of doing my thing and learning from the people I'm around and who I cross paths with.

The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable advertisement of all others, but the least practiced, is to study and learn how to know ourselves. This is the foundation of wisdom and the highway to whatever is good.

I went to hockey camp at Michigan because my dad has some relatives in the Ann Arbor area. We went to visit them as kids, and you start to learn the language from being around people. At the same time, when I got to college, I thought my English was better than it really was. I learned a lot over my four years.

I just look at all the fruit and all the people's lives that are being changed and are being touched. And that's what we really focus on because we hear - every day we get mail, we visit with people, and their lives are being changed.

My education in the arts began at the Cleveland Museum of Art. As a Cleveland child, I visited the museum's halls and corridors, gallery spaces and shows, over and over. For me, the Cleveland Museum was a school of my very own - the place where my eyes opened, my tastes developed, my ideas about beauty and creativity grew.

San Diego shaped me a lot. The visual landscapes, the emotional panoramas, the teachers and mentors I had from the third grade through San Diego High - it's all a big part of the poetry fountain that I continue to drink from.

When I began to choreograph and find my way pulling other artists' dreams out and changing music in a visual way, there was still a part of me that had something more to say. There was still a desire to rock a stage and ultimately perform the eight count of my dream, but there was a lot of insecurity there.

I don't want to do transformations on people for the sake of a visual. I want to do it because it makes sense.

As soon as I went to painting school in New York, I took an experimental film course, and everything clicked and came together. I realized my love of music and drama and the visual arts all came together. This happened in 1989. Since then, it's been a long road of educating myself in every possible way.

The desire for self-improvement is vital. There is no point in pushing children; they need to be the ones who want to learn new skills.

I've grown, and my passion for music has grown. I've become more advanced and I've enhanced my vocabulary. All around artist development.

I should be more vocal about the things I believe are doing us harm, but many years ago in my early twenties, I learned a bit of a lesson. I started to realise at that time the benefits of eating healthy food and drink.

I'd always put on little shows at home, but when I was 11, I did a community event in Woodford, where anyone could go. You had three days of vocal training and performed your song at the end.

The first time I performed at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, I was in the back of the room doing vocal exercises. 'Me-me-me, my-my-my, mo-mo-mo.' And I'm looking around, and no one else is doing it. I'm like, 'They must have done it before they came to the club.' I came to realize that I was an idiot.

I've never had anything as formal as vocal lessons.

I think I've learned a lot on the vocal side of things.

Maybe I was just born with a little bit of vocals or natural talent, but I feel like I taught myself.

Childhood is generally far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up. Longitudinal studies following thousands of people across time have shown that most people only begin to gravitate toward certain vocational interests, and away from others, around middle school.