Quotes about Personal Growth

You can't go back and make a new start, but you can start right now and make a brand new ending.

Probably the most honest "self-made man" ever was the one we heard say: "I got to the top the hard way — fighting my own laziness and ignorance every step of the way."

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 the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite." Frank

No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention," Lincoln was wont to say.

talk about their work, their families, their lives. He had always loved to talk, but now he learned to listen, and to listen intently, his head nodding in a welcoming way, with an air of sympathetic identification, an attentive posture and manner that would become a lifelong characteristic.

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

she had to fight for qualities that had not been even in her vocabulary. Patience. Self-discipline. Self-control. Self-abnegation. Chastity. Adaptability to others - this above all. This always.

I don't think I really saw people except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

Younger woman says, "I'm not going to be like my mother. You're maniacs. You're mad." "Yes," [older woman responds] "I know it. And so you won't be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?

When a woman begins making love with a new man, a creature is born in her - of emotional and sexual responses that grows in its own laws, its own logic.

That they were both 'insecure' and 'unrooted', words which dated from the era of Mother Sugar, they both freely acknowledged. But Anna had recently been learning to use these words in a different way, not as something to be apologized for, but as flags or banners for an attitude that amounted to a different philosophy.

Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read -- something most important what I should not try to write.

I made my life, the same way it looks like you're gonna make yours—out of pride and stubbornness and too much anger. You better think hard, Ruth Anne, about what you want and who you're mad at. You better think hard.

Once I was born, her hopes had turned and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun

I wanted the way I felt to mean something and for everything in my life to change because of it.

Age can mellow, they say.' 'They say wrong,' said Diccon Chancellor. 'I have known Mistress Philippa these two months, and I have aged while she has grown daily less mellow. Why else am I fleeing the country?

You rode sixty miles through the night for a brother who doesn't exist. I haven't been here for four years. I have been growing and changing, somewhere else, with different people, speaking a different language. The old ties are gone: my family wouldn't recognize me: what in God's name do you think I could find to say to them?

She died, knowing your parentage?" Marthe shrugged. "The secret died with her. It would trouble her little. She had breathed life into her puppets: you and I to discover what in ourselves we still lacked. Philippa to be gilded as befitted her spirit. Jerott…to be taken from you. And my lover and I to be parted.

It's terribly important for everyone, at any age, to live to his full potential. Otherwise a kind of dry rot sets in, a rust, a disintegration of personality

In youth, it was a way I had, To do my best to please. And change, with every passing lad To suit his theories. But now I know the things I know And do the things I do, And if you do not like me so, To hell, my love, with you." ? Dorothy Parker, The Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I've ended up where I needed to be.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ? Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul