Quotes about Personal Growth

I went to a psychiatrist once. I was doing something that had become a pattern in my life, and I thought, Well, I should go talk to a psychiatrist. When I got into the room, l asked him, Do you think that this process could, in any way, damage my creativity? And he said, Well, David, I have to be honest: it could. And I shook his hand and left.

When I was young, I did a lot of things with pine. But then, I started falling in love with Douglas fir, vertical-grain Douglas fir.

Find a purpose in life so big it will challenge every capacity to be at your best.

One day reach idealization; after all, it's the journey, not the destination.

A solid sense of self develops from confronting yourself, challenging yourself to do what's right, and earning your own self-respect.

Autonomy and independence involve taking care of yourself—not doing things that diminish you.

When we stand up and confront ourselves in ways our parents have not, a desire for justice makes it harder to forgive them in some ways. However, the increased differentiation this endeavor provides allows one to better self-soothe, to validate one's own experience, thereby unhooking the need for confession from one's parent. At this point, forgiveness becomes an act of self-caring and a deliberate decision to get on with one's life.

My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.

Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape.

But he didn't used to be this nice and agreeable, I complained to Hugh. Well, he is now, he said. Why can't you let people change?

all ensigns should be pruned back occasionally. It served them in good stead later.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

Sure I'm cut but not for the sake of vanity...

What stuff is a man made of, who has freed himself of his wounds?

The course of one's life is a difficult thing. -from Diary of My Sixteenth Year

But peace returns to my heart. Not peace as it used to be before it left me years ago. It went away to school, matured as I did, and came back looking like me.

Un líder auténtico nos mostrará que hay dos caminos que podemos tomar: admitir nuestros errores y cambiar, u ocultarnos la verdad a nosotros mismos y culpar a los demás

You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means.

I knew my mother was in the process of becoming, or trying to become, "an intellectual," because my father often threw this term at her as a form of insult during their arguments.

I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end—we are not our parents and they are not us—my father's children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years...whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face

Maybe it doesn't matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. Moored to the shore she set out from, as almost all women were, once.

Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.

Maybe it doesn't matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. Moored to the shore she set out from, as almost all women were, once.

They don't mind what their kids do in life as long as they're reasonably, you know, healthy. Happy. And every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be.