Quotes about Personal Growth

The fault lies with us, and only us. It's not fate, not genetics, not bad luck, and it's definitely not Mom and Dad. Ultimately it's us and our choices...but the most powerful spectacular thing is that the solution rests with us as well.

Some so weighty we carry them our whole lives. They can blight our very existence, or they can make us stronger. They can make us bitter or teach us compassion. They can drive us to do things we never thought ourselves capable of. Wonderful achievements, like becoming Chief Inspector and Commander. Or horrific things. Terrible dark deeds.

Until we made peace with the less agreeable parts of our past they'd continue to heckle us from way down the long house. And sometimes the really loud, obnoxious ones told us what to do, directing our actions even years later.

Let it go. You have your own life. Not Uncle Saul's, not your parents'.' His face had grown very serious then, his eyes searching. 'You can't live in the past and you certainly can't undo it. What happened to Uncle Saul has nothing to do with you. Memories can kill, Yvette. The past can reach right up and grab you and drag you to a place you shouldn't be. Like a burning building.

the most powerful, spectacular thing is that the solution rests with us as well. We're the only ones who can change our lives, turn them around. So all those years waiting for someone else to do it are wasted.

think many people love their problems. Gives them all sorts of excuses for not growing up and getting on with life.

Home as an allegory for self. A self-portrait of our choices. And our blind spots.

Don't believe everything you think. Chief Inspector Gamache wrote that on the board for the incoming cadets at the start of every year at the Sûreté academy, and it stayed there all year. At first the students in the class he taught laughed. It sounded clever but silly. Little by little most got it. And those who didn't did not progress further. That phrase was as powerful as any weapon they'd be handed.

And the enemy you'll be fighting is yourself.

I think you have to get better, as you get older. Or, your perspective gets better, even if the work doesn't seem any better. When I was writing songs when I was 17, I was trying to write from a more experienced point of view. As you get older, you're not writing from an imagined point of view. You guess less.

If the ego is inflated it must be gradually deflated.

Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts.

Your body expresses yesterday in what it wants today. If you think: yesterday I was, tomorrow I shall be, you are thinking: I have died a little. Be what you are becoming, without clinging to what you might have been, what you might yet be. Never settle. Leave definitiveness to the undecided; we don't need it.

I hate failure and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.

I am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what I said to myself about myself when I was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six but I am running into a new year and I beg what i love and I leave to forgive me.

There's so many other things to write about than unrequited love.

Yo he aprendido más de mi tierra yendo a los indios ranqueles, que en diez años de despestañarme, leyendo opúsculos, folletos, gacetillas, revistas y libros especiales.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

Everyone tries to use the powers that are in him: And calves will butt before they have grown their horns.

Scale is not a destination. Don't get caught up in the narrative telling you to grow if growth isn't what you really want. Remember, big isn't the same as great.

the fact that you'll never know what sort of person you might have been if you'd read different stuff

Nothing is more intolerable than to have admit to yourself your own errors.

I may not have a degree, but I certainly got an education.

But forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me. It's saying, You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.