Quotes about Personal Growth

If you cannot get rid of the skeleton in the closet- you may as well take it out and make it dance.

Stop telling yourself the 'same crap, different day. Recognize that throughout this beautiful day, you have an incredible amount of opportunities to move your life into the direction you want it to go.

I make mistakes like the next person. The only real mistake is the one from which I learned nothing.

Oh God just look at me now... "I am the perfect version of me.

In short, the greatest gift of relationship proves to be that as the result of encountering each other, we are obliged to grow larger than we had planned.

Thus we are forced into a difficult choice: anxiety or depression. If we move forward, as our soul insists, we may be flooded with anxiety. If we do not move forward, we will suffer the depression, the pressing down of the soul's purpose. In such a difficult choice one must choose anxiety, for anxiety is at least the path of personal growth; depression is a stagnation and defeat of life.

Jung once observed that we cannot grow up until we can see our parents as other adults, special to our biography certainly, wounded perhaps, but most of all simply other people who did or did not take on the largeness of their own journey. We have our own journey, for sure, and that is large enough to take us beyond our personal history toward our full potential.

The first half of life, at least for most of us, is essentially a giant, unavoidable mistake.

What we have become is typically an assemblage of defense mechanisms and anxiety-management systems generated by the adaptive needs that our fate-fueled biographies bring to us.

Where do you refuse to grow up, wait for certainty of wisdom before choosing, hope for solutions to emerge fully formed, expect rescue, or wait for a guru to make sense of it all for you?

We have to recall the functional definition of the Shadow as that which renders us uncomfortable in confronting in ourselves.

Of each critical juncture of choice, one may usefully ask, "Does this path enlarge or diminish me?" Usually, we know the answer to the question. We know it intuitively, instinctively, in the gut. Choosing the path that enlarges is always going to mean choosing the path of individuation. The gods want us to grow up, to step up to that high calling that each soul carries as its destiny.

David McKay, 1900. Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929. Yeats, William Butler. A Vision

And thus fourthly, it only stands to reason, that the best thing we can do for ourselves and for the other is to assume more of the developmental agenda for ourselves.

The angst-driven search for external authority through fundamentalism is a flight from personal growth and development, an abdication of the summons to individual life.

for what we have most to share with them is not our learning or our techniques, but rather who we have become and what darkness we have faced in the world and in ourselves.

Imagine what our story would look like if, rather than succumbing to the insistent voices of family or culture, we determined that our vocation was to be a better human.

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

First you must take your degree. Set that before you as your first aim. Then, little by little, you will see your way. I mean in every sense, your way in life and in thinking.

He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world.

I told myself I did not have to live as I once did. I did not have to re-create the violent moments that used to come aborning like a sulfurous match flaring off a thumbnail.

Get a lot of gone between you and this situation.

We are the sum total of what we have done and where we have been, and I sincerely believe that in many ways the world in which I grew up was better than the one in which we live today.

It's strange how people bloom, even in poisonous soil, once they allow themselves to become what they've always been.