Quotes About Development

If you treat man as he appears to be, you make him worse than he is. But if you treat man as if he already were what he potentially could be, you make him what he should be.

If at the end of our time together you find yourself walking out with just what you walked in with, you will have wasted your time.

It is only in the dance between chaos and order that life progresses.

A beating will loosen a child's hide and let him grow.

A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.

Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were.

The sad truth is that certain types of things can't go backward. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can't go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that's how it will stay forever.

Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn't happen right away.

Mental acuity was never born from comfortable circumstances.

The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.

Writers have to keep on writing if they want to mature, like caterpillars endlessly chewing on leaves.

What's nurtured slowly grows well.

None of us are ever finished. Everyone is always a work in progress.

That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

The way surviving hard winters makes a tree grows stronger, the growth rings inside it tighter

With my own hands, I had to construct this thing I called 'I' –or, rather, make the things that constituted me.

I add things, cross them off, then add a whole other bunch and cross them off, too.

What has gone forward can't go back to where it came from.

People grow up, and when they grow up they change/

People are in constant motion, never stationary. No one knows what will happen next.

After a certain length of time has passed, things harden up. Like cement hardening in a bucket. And we can't go back anymore.

Don't blame me. That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution.

Give yourself permission to screw up.

Corporations that do a better-than-average job of developing leaders put an emphasis on creating challenging opportunities for relatively young employees.