Quotes about Personal Growth

So this is where the years of maturity deliver us - to this needy, selfish, unwieldy wish to be somebody else's first and primal other.

It is a lesson for all ages: the importance of seeing mistakes not as personal failings to be denied or justified but as inevitable aspects of life that help us improve our work, make better decisions, grow, and grow up.

I see no reason why I should be consciously wrong today because I was unconsciously wrong yesterday. —Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, 1948

We are forever being told that we should learn from our mistakes, but how can we learn unless we first admit that we made those mistakes? To do that, we have to recognize the siren song of self-justification.

Conway and Ross referred to this self-serving memory distortion as "getting what you want by revising what you had." On the larger stage of life, many of us do just that: We misremember our history as being worse than it was, thus distorting our perception of how much we have improved so that we'll feel better about ourselves now.15 All of us do grow and mature, but generally not as much as we think.

Let's write ourselves a better ending than this.

One day you'll wake up and you'll realise that you're OK again.

Chapter thirty-four

Sometimes we speak and feel too much as if 'an education' were a finished product, to be bought and paid for, often with great sacrifice, and bestowed. In reality, education can only be attained by personal effort, and should be for each a continuing process, ending only with life itself, or possibly then just well begun. There are fortunately many roads to personal culture and usefulness, and not all lead through the college campus.

All the joy is gone, somewhere along the way she broke her own heart and without a heart you can't get better.

That's a cheat,' I say. 'You can't go through life blaming your childhood for the way you are as an adult.

Feels right: music to my ears. My therapist has tried to steer me toward that feeling for eons: forget about what you think you're supposed to do, forget about what others expect you to do; what feels right, to you?

The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.

Forgiveness, quite frankly, is the most selfish thing you can do. Because it is the greatest thing you can do for yourself.

Being in therapy is great. I spend an hour just talking about myself. It's kinda like being the guy on a date.

It is possible never to have done with knocking our heads over the same few biographical incidents that insist upon being the arbitrary markers of our lives.

Because you can make decisions for yourself even if they're wrong. Mistakes can be corrected. Life is too short to have everyone else tell you how to live. Make a few mistakes, and learn from them. At least they'll be real, and you'll be living, not just existing.

When your healthy self is strong enough to deal with all that comes your way in life, your eating disorder self will no longer be useful or necessary. You

Remember what to do when you're at the bottom of a hole? You've got to stop digging.

Does "doing exactly what I want" mean not thinking about other people's feelings? Because that's just not the kind of person I am. Maybe it can mean whatever I want it to mean, like taking care of myselfand not letting people walk over me

The one I wore to kill Jabba (my favorite moment in my own personal film history), which I highly recommend your doing: find an equivalent of killing a giant space slug in your head and celebrate that.

I've got to learn something from my mistakes instead of establishing a new record to break.

not nice being inside my head. It's a nice place to visit but I don't want to live in here. It's too crowded; too many traps and pitfalls. I'm tired of it. The same old person, day in and day out. I'd like to try something else. I tried to neaten my mind, file everything away into tidy little thoughts, but it only got more and more cluttered. My mind has a mind of its own. I try to define my

You needn't ever make mountains out of molehills again. You have misjudged yourself. You are not who you think you are.