"Often, it’s not about becoming a new person, but becoming the person you were meant to be, and already are, but don’t know how to be.
"
— Heath L. Buckmaster (Box of Hair: A Fairy Tale)

"Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."
— Terry Pratchett (A Hat Full of Sky)

"Be not afraid of growing slowly. Be afraid only of standing still."
— Chinese Proverb

"Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it."
— Andy Rooney

"No matter what happened yesterday it is insignificant when compared to what lies within the core of your being today.
"
— Sandy Brewer (Pursuit of Light: An Extraordinary Journey)

"The body grows slowly and steadily but the soul grows by leaps and bounds. It may come to its full stature in an hour."
— L.M. Montgomery (Rilla of Ingleside (Anne of Green Gables, #8))

"Become the kind of person the kind of person you would like to marry would like to marry."
— Douglas Wilson

"This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified."
— Martin Luther

"Live simply. Deepest joy is like a flower....beautiful in essence."
— Tony Samara

"We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow."
— Oscar Wilde

"The older I grow, the less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath."
— Elizabeth Clarkson Zwart

"Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago."
— Horace Mann

"The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else."
— Douglas Kennedy (Pursuit of Happiness)

"Mistakes are the growing pains of wisdom."
— William Jordan

"Every problem is a gift - without problems we would not grow."
— Anthony Robbins

"An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human."
— Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)

"Within each of us is a light, awake, encoded in the fibers of our existence. Divine ecstasy is the totality of this marvelous creation experienced in the hearts of humanity"
— Tony Samara

"Unhappiness does not come from the way things are, but from the difference between how things are and how we think they should be"
— Creflo Dollar

"Growth is the only evidence of life."
— John Henry Newman

"A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others; a loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he knows."
— Sydney J. Harris

"It had been all right as long as they could laugh at me and appear clever at my expense, but now they were feeling inferior to the moron. I began to see that by my astonishing growth I had made them shrink and emphasized their inadequacies. I had betrayed them, and they hated me for it (96)."
— Daniel Keyes (Flowers for Algernon)

"A single day is enough to make us a little larger."
— Paul Klee

"Don't you notice that there are particular moments when you are naturally inspired to introspection? Work with them gently, for these are the moments when you can go through a powerful experience, and your whole worldview can change quickly."
— Sogyal Rinpoche

"Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
"
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"It may actually be more healthy to be disturbed, confused, or searching than confident, certain, and secure."
— Mark Scandrette (Soul Graffiti: Making a Life in the Way of Jesus)

"We all have to learn to live with our losses, and to use our regrets to spur us on in the future."
— John Christopher (The Pool of Fire)

"Personal growth has its price, and she was paying it without complaint."
— Paulo Coelho (Veronika Decides to Die: A Novel of Redemption)

"
I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees-must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.
Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering wit hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso.
Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for they own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?"
— Aidan Chambers (This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn)

"There is no man...however wise, who has not at some period in his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man..."
— Marcel Proust (Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove)

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."
— Anaïs Nin

"People whose minds are not strengthened for endurance are by no means always unintelligent. They simply have never stopped to think that the use of the mind for the purpose of growth is a necessary part of a God-pleasing lifestyle."
— Gordon MacDonald (Ordering Your Private World)

"Most of us plateau when we lose the tension between where we are and where we ought to be."
— John Gardiner

"When you’re growing up, it takes a long time for you to realize that there’s something different about you. On one level, you know there’s something strange, but on another, yourself is the only thing you ever knew."
— Brooke Stevens (The Circus of the Earth and the Air)

"He had also been demonstrative and intelligent from the very beginning, his questions startlingly insightful. She would watch him absorb a new idea and wonder what effect it would have on him, because, with Edgar, EVERYTHING came out, eventually, somehow. But the PROCESS – how he put together a story about the world’s workings – that was mysterious beyond all ken. In a way, she thought, it was the only disappointing thing about having a child. She’d imagined he would stay transparent to her, more PART of her, for so much longer. But despite the proximity of the daily work, Edgar had ceased long before to be an open book. A friend, yes. A son she loved, yes. But when it came to knowing his thoughts, Edgar could be opaque as a rock. (295)"
— David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle)

"Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago."
— Bernard Berenson

"Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur."
— Joanna Russ

"Thought breeds thought; children familiar with great thoughts take as naturally to thinking for themselves as the well-nourished body takes to growing; and we must bear in mind that growth, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is the sole end of education.
"
— Charlotte Mason (The Original Home Schooling Series by Charlotte Mason)

"Out of the new arrivals in our lives--the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child---we constantly make of ourselves our selves."
— Nancy Mairs

"The more important question, of course, was what the new Lucy would do, and even though I was pretty sure the old Lucy wouldn't be around much anymore, I was a little bit afraid the new Lucy hadn't yet shown up."
— Pam Houston (Waltzing the Cat)

"By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity."
— Vernon Howard

"But no city-state ever solved the problem of incorporating new territories and new populations into its existing structure, or involving really large numbers of people in its political life (p. 11)"
— Joseph Reese Strayer (On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State)

"It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them."
— Henry David Thoreau

"And we are made different. On the instant. What we know, what we were, is banished by that instant, razed like a castle under siege, and nothing is recognizable is left. The world is unmade."
— Jennifer Roberson (Lady Of Sherwood)