Quotes about Personal Growth

Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.

The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.

There is nothing that so raises a young man's self-esteem, that so contributes to the formation of his character as for him to find himself unexpectedly confronted with a task which he has to accomplish entirely on his own initiative and by his own efforts.

Finally, she'd found a group on Corellia that had helped her deal with her addiction, helped her realize why she felt so empty, so driven. It took me months of hard digging into myself, she said. Months to figure out why I wanted to hurt myself. I finally got it through my head that just because my mother hated and despised me for not being what she wanted me to be, I didn't have to hate myself. I didn't have to destroy myself in some twisted attempt to please her.

Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn't work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way around. And if you're writing memoir you're bound to discover things about yourself you didn't realize before, may indeed prefer never to have know, but there you are: progress of some sort.

You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.

Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.

To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.

Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper and loss of self-control.

No man who is resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention.

Books don't change lives... People change lives... Sometimes, if you're lucky, if you get the thing right, a book can say some important things and that's all fine and good... but a book is just an artifact... a thing that sits on a desk or a shelf... People make the real difference... People and love...

All your life you was one thing. And now you can be something else if you want! Somebody completely different. You can actually start yourself over from scratch. Turn yourself into what you have always wanted to be!

The wise man leaves the past behind like a pair of boots he has outgrown. Ciro

A woman choses a man she thinks she deserves then sets out to change him to suit herself

Remember, the light at the end of the tunnel may be you.

Those who pretend that they can mend others should first mend themselves, and then they will be more readily believed.

We are all locked in rooms in different ways, and part of growing up is finding different kinds of keys, and meeting the people who will help free you.

our changes in height remained unmarked on the door frames, so we grew up tall on our own without proof

As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.

Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

To be mature is, we're told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone.

We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.

There would come a moment with every book when we would feel that something was incongruous, misunderstood, or constraining, and it would give us a responsibility to leave our guide behind and continue our thoughts alone.