Quotes about Personal Growth

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness, which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. —Marcel Proust

But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things.

I hate you. My sister said it different than she said it to my dad. She meant it with me.She really did. I love you, was all I could say in return. You're a freak, you know that? Everyone says so. They always have. I'm trying not to be." Then, I turned around and walked to my room and closed my door and put my head under my pillow and let the quiet put things where they are supposed to be.[pp.28]

So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.

Me acosté en su vieja cama, y miré por la ventana este árbol que probablemente era mucho más pequeño cuando mi padre lo miraba. Y pude sentir lo que sentía en la noche cuando se dio cuenta de que si no se iba, nunca sería su vida. Sería de ellos.

Supongo que somos quienes somos por muchas razones, y quizás nunca conozcamos la mayoría de ellas.

But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.

Please, don't do this to yourself, Charlie." But I did do it to myself. Like I do every year on my birthday. "I'm sorry.

Bill said I was 'developing' at a rapid pace and gave me a different kind of book as a 'reward'. It's On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I'm now up to about ten cigarettes a day.

We are who we are for alot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them.

Frost's early years were spent finding out who he was. But his later years were spent increasingly being who he was on purpose. As he himself said, the story of his life is the story of someone becoming more and more himself. He later wrote: They would not find me changed from him they knew— Only more sure of all I thought was true.

A good affirmation has five basic ingredients: it's personal, it's positive, it's present tense, it's visual, and it's emotional.

So also in a marriage or in helping a teenager through a difficult identity crisis—there is no quick fix, where you can just move in and make everything right with a positive mental attitude and a bunch of success formulas.

There is no future in a job. The only future is inside oneself. We look inside rather than outside. We become producer rather than consumers of other peoples' production.

Each man in his own way had gone through what Richard Winters experienced: a realization that doing his best was a better way of getting through the Army than hanging around with the sad excuses for soldiers they met in the recruiting depots or basic training. They wanted to make their Army time positive, a learning and maturing and challenging experience.

If you have been, I'm glad you've stopped.

Little girls grow up to be women, little boys grow up to be little boys.

Could do better' is a meaningless conclusion. 'Could be happier' is the only one that counts.

As all travellers know, the experience of a foreign country teaches about your own.

Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?

Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.

because the hardest boss a man can ever have is himself.

He thinks writing is also a kind of war, one you fight with yourself. The story is what you carry and every time you add to it, it gets heavier.

You didn't get sober to be stupid, Danny. Keep it in mind the next time you start listening to that itty-bitty shitty committee inside your head.