Quotes about Personal Growth

I have created myself a soul, big as the world, that leaks all over, and I have to keep calling for the plumber.

Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.

Perfection is static, and I am in full progress.

Read the Golden Ass of Apuleius and Les Diaboliques in French." . . . "Go to Russian Church on Rue Crimée for the music." . . . "Get back the first volume of Albertine and make annotations . . . write copiously, there is time for everything" . . . "Read Jacques Maritain.

We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task.

One word I would banish from the dictionary is 'escape.' Just banish that and you'll be fine. Because that word has been misused regarding anybody who wanted to move away from a certain spot and wanted to grow. He was an escapist. […] You have a right to experiment with your life.

When Allendy says, "I am cold and grey," I sense the obscure, buried, sunken, eclipsed man who was stifled by his mother. No one was ever born without that light or flame of life. Some event, some person stifles or drowns it altogether.

The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.

En voyage, j'absorbe tout et l'ajoute à moi-même.

Making new friends and partners, mid-life, is the greatest thing in the world. Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

I feel so many things growing–my individuality, my confidence; I feel lines of my character growing stronger. I'm really sprouting, springing up, with mixed feelings of tenderness and bitterness, faith and disillusion, hardness and softness. I have never felt so clearly that my Self is – obscurely and stubbornly self-made.

I feel that an initial shock has shattered my wholeness, that I am like a shattered mirror. Each piece has gone off and developed a life of its own. They have not died from the shock (as, in some cases I have seen, women who died from betrayals, go into mourning, abdicate all love, never renew contact with man again), but separated into several selves, and each one developed a life of its own.

The hours that go to the journal are an evasion, fundamentally, of the imminent, the ever-impending problem—that of mastering your medium, of becoming the artist you are.

One goes to the magician, as one goes to the analyst, or any quack—to reaffirm one's own secret volitions. Not to be cured, not to be warned, not to be saved, but to become what one wants to be.

The self requires a story.

Throw away my book: you must understand that it represents only one of a thousand attitudes. You must find your own. If someone else could have done something as well as you, don't do it. If someone else could have said something as well as you, don't say it—or written something as well as you, don't write it. Grow fond only of that which you can find nowhere but in yourself, and create out of yourself, impatiently or patiently, ah! that most irreplaceable of beings.

El secreto de mi éxito fue rodearme de personas mejores que yo.

Over the years, you'll be amazed at how your experience has blossomed and your skills have grown.

YOU CAN'T FIX LIFE BY WORKING ON THE OUTSIDE.

Here, all this time, Less thought he was merely a bad writer. A bad lover, a bad friend, a bad son. Apparently the condition is worse; he is bad at being himself.

by now, he is well acquainted with humility. It is the one piece of luggage he has not lost.

This is once-in-a-lifetime suffering and pain and heartache and yet it may be your only chance to decide what you really want. None of this I don't want to change bullshit. Hell no—you've changed. That's happened. Now what? Everything changes and this one fucking time, you're in charge of it, my God, so choose! Make the wrong choice, that's fine! That's fine! But choose.

Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.

It is a surprise to me to like myself; among all the elaborate possibilities I contemplated for my future, that never figured. My hard-won contentment reflects the simple truth that inner peace often hinges on outer peace. In the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas, Jesus says, "If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.