Growth is a continuous journey that shapes who we are and who we aspire to become. Whether you're facing challenges, seeking motivation, or simply looking to expand your perspective, words of wisdom from those who have experienced growth can be incredibly powerful. We've gathered 144 inspiring growth quotes to uplift your spirit and encourage your personal development. Dive in and let these quotes spark the motivation you need to keep moving forward.
1. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” - Anais Nin
2. “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
3. “My turn shall also come:I sense the spreading of a wing.” - Osip Mandelstam
4. “An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.” - Edward Abbey
5. “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” - Edward Abbey
6. “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
7. “Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.” - Jelaluddin Rumi
8. “Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.” - Dorothy L. Sayers
9. “Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you are.” - Cherie Carter-Scott
10. “We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.” - Vladimir Nabokov
11. “We find comfort among those who agree with us - growth among those who don't.” - Frank A. Clark
12. “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
13. “Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.” - Benjamin Franklin
14. “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
15. “He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly's unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is, they ache until they atrophy.” - Harold Brodkey
16. “We all have to learn to live with our losses, and to use our regrets to spur us on in the future.” - John Christopher
17. “Faithfulness in small things leads to faithfulness in great things, and never the other way around.” - Pastor Jerry L. Lewis
18. “You only grow when you are alone.” - Paul Newman
19. “But what is the way forward? I know what it isn't. It's not, as we once believed, plenty to eat and a home with all the modern conveniences. It's not a 2,000-mile-long wall to keep Mexicans out or more accurate weapons to kill them. It's not a better low-fat meal or a faster computer speed. It's not a deodorant, a car, a soft drink, a skin cream. The way forward is found on a path through the wilderness of the head and heart---reason and emotion. Thinking, knowing, understanding.” - Laurence Gonzales
20. “Don't let your habits become handcuffs” - Elizabeth Berg
21. “More learning can occur when there are many obstacles then when thear are few or none. A life with difficult relationships, filled with obstacles and losses, presents the most opportunity for the soul's growth. You may have chosen the more difficult life so that you could accelerate your physical progress” - Brian Weiss
22. “In my experience, self-hatred is the dominant malaise crippling Christians and stifling their growth in the Holy Spirit.” - Brennan Manning
23. “Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.” - Rainer Maria Rilke
24. “Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.” - Alfred North Whitehead
25. “When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. And when life is bitter, say thank you and grow.” - Shauna Niequist
26. “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
27. “Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it.” - Andy Rooney
28. “We become aware of the void as we fill it.” - Antonio Porchia
29. “By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity.” - Vernon Howard
30. “If people refuse to look at you in a new light and they can only see you for what you were, only see you for the mistakes you've made, if they don't realize that you are not your mistakes, then they have to go.” - Steve Maraboli
31. “One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.” - Edward T. Hall
32. “Not everyone is allotted the chance to become a personality; most remain types, and never experience the rigor of becoming an individual. But those who do so inevitably discover that these struggles bring them into conflict with the normal life of average people and the traditional values and bourgeois conventions that they uphold. A personality is the product of a clash between two opposing forces: the urge to create a life of one's own and the insistence by the world around us that we conform. Nobody can develop a personality unless he undergoes revolutionary experiences. The extent of those experiences differs, of course, from person to person, as does the capacity to lead a life that is truly personal and unique.” - Hermann Hesse
33. “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
34. “I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.” - Janet Fitch
35. “We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky.” - Walter Mosley
36. “Life can take so many twists and turns. You can’t ever count yourself out. Even if you’re really afraid at some point, you can’t think that there’s no room for you to grow and do something good with your life.” - Portia De Rossi
37. “We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.” - H.G. Wells
38. “We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.” - Hunter S. Thompson
39. “When every situation which life can offer is turned to the profit of spiritual growth, no situation can really be a bad one.” - Paul Brunton
40. “No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” - David Foster Wallace
41. “Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.” - William James
42. “A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller.” - Paul Klee
43. “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
44. “I'd learned enough from life's experiences to understand that destiny's interventions can sometimes be read as invitation for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn't take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity.” - Elizabeth Gilbert
45. “Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that's good.” - Elizabeth Edwards
46. “DeathWish: You spent some time working with Courtney Love and Billy Corgan on a creative level, how did this experience help your growth as an artist?EA: It didn't -- it stunted it entirely. I gave up over a year of my life and career helping Billy with his flop of an album and designing and building all of the costumes for his music video. With Courtney, we were friends, but I spent years working to record and promote her flop of an album only to find that my value increased every time I peed in an orange juice bottle so that she could fake her way through a drug test. Not exactly a haven for artistic growth.” - Emilie Autumn
47. “Science is only a Latin word for knowledge” - Carl Sagan
48. “What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew” - Robert Browning
49. “Maybe you have to live under cover for a while before you can find your true character.” - Hugo Hamilton
50. “The goal of climbing big, dangerous mountains should be to attain some sort of spiritual and personal growth, but this won’t happen if you compromise away the entire process.” - Yvon Chouinard
51. “We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.” - George Eliot
52. “It changes you for ever, but you are changing for ever anyway.” - Margaret Mahy
53. “I now see my life, not as a slow shaping of achievment to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery of a purpose which I did not know.” - Joanna Field
54. “there is no growth except in the fulfillment of obligations” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
55. “Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.” - Wallace Stegner
56. “What makes night within us may leave stars.” - Victor Hugo
57. “I see now that the path I choose through the maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being—one of many ways—and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming.” - Daniel Keyes
58. “I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.” - Hermann Hesse
59. “Personal growth has its price, and she was paying it without complaint.” - Paulo Coelho
60. “The striving of humanity for knowledge and truth [can] not be suppressed. The growth of the spirit [is]an essential part of Creation; it was planned like the growth of the body, of the plants and animals and people - every living thing that God had created.” - Peter Prange
61. “The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.For self is a sea boundless and measureless.Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.” Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.”For the soul walks upon all paths.The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.” - Kahlil Gibran
62. “Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.” - Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
63. “Sometimes we know in our bones what we really need to do, but we're afraid to do it. Taking a chance and stepping beyond the safety of the world we've always known is the only way to grow, though and without risk there is no reward.” - Wil Wheaton
64. “Every test successfully met is rewarded by some growth in intuitive knowledge, strengthening of character, or initiation into a higher consciousness.” - Paul Brunton
65. “After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.” - George Eliot
66. “Growth is betrayal.” - John Updike
67. “No Temple made by mortal human hands can ever compare to the Temple made by the gods themselves. That building of wood and stone that houses us and that many believe conceals the great Secret Temple from prying eyes, somewhere in its heart of hearts, is but a decoy for the masses who need this simple concrete limited thing in their lives. The real Temple is the whole world, and there is nothing as divinely blessed as a blooming growing garden.” - Vera Nazarian
68. “Tough love may be tough to give, but it is a necessity of life and assurance of positive growth.” - T.F. Hodge
69. “From the cradle to the grave, joy and pain is the fertilizer for wisdom.” - T.F. Hodge
70. “It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.” - Mitch Albom
71. “A diamond doesn't start out polished and shining. It once was nothing special, but with enough pressure and time, becomes spectacular. I'm that diamond.” - Solange nicole
72. “Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.” - Richard Flanagan
73. “When you see people only as personalities, rather than souls with life missions to fulfill, you forever limit the growth and possibilities of what God has in store for another person.” - Shannon Alder
74. “When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it's the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not willing to do that, at least we should notice that we are not willing. The moment of disappointment in life is an incomparable gift that we receive many times a day if we're alert. This gift is always present in anyone's life, that moment when 'It's not the way I want it!” - Charlotte Joko Beck
75. “Acceptance makes an incredible fertile soil for the seeds of change.” - Steve Maraboli
76. “The path of development is a journey of discovery that is clear only in retrospect, and it’s rarely a straight line.” - Eileen Kennedy-Moore
77. “Oh thrice fools are we who like new-born princes weeping in the cradle know not that there is a kingdom before them then let our Lord's sweet hand square us and hammer us and strike off the knots of pride self-love and world-worship and infidelity that He may make us stones and pillars in His Father's house.” - Samuel Rutherford
78. “Regardless of whether a relationship brings us joy or sorrow, each relationship gives us the opportunity to grow stronger, nobler, and more compassionate with ourselves and others.” - Tamela Rich
79. “Human beings have always been an unfinished species, a story in the middle, a succession of families, tribes, and societies in transition to new awarenesses. Although we have always prided ourselves on our willingness to adapt to all habitats, and on our skill at prospering and making ourselves comfortable wherever we are -- in a meadow, in a desert, on the tundra, or out on the ocean -- we don't just adapt to places, or modify them in order to ease our burdens. We're the only species that over and over again has deliberately transformed our surroundings in order to stretch our capacity for understanding and provoke new accomplishments. And our growing and enhanced understanding is our most valuable, and our most vulnerable, inheritance.” - Tony Hiss
80. “Today I am someone different. Today I have finally become who I really am.” - C. JoyBell C.
81. “Boulevards are like people: similar in their youth, they undergo gradual change according to what ferments in them.” - M. Ageyev
82. “Small herbs have grace, great weeds to grow apace.” - William Shakespeare
83. “You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.” - Anais Nin
84. “Voll Blüten steht der Pfirsichbaum nicht jede wächst zur Frucht sie schimmern hell wie Rosenschaum durch Blau und Wolkenflucht. Wie Blüten geh'n Gedanken auf hundert an jedem Tag -- lass' blühen, lass' dem Ding den Lauf frag' nicht nach dem Ertrag! Es muss auch Spiel und Unschuld sein und Blütenüberfluss sonst wär' die Welt uns viel zu klein und Leben kein Genuss.” - Hermann Hesse
85. “You will never be entirely comfortable. This is the truth behind the champion - he is always fighting something. To do otherwise is to settle.” - Julien Smith
86. “Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.” - Lev Grossman
87. “The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth - with a capital G. 'Progress' in our nation has for too long been confused with 'Growth'; I see the two as different, almost incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better - toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote, the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to be here as we do.” - Edward Abbey
88. “You can curse the moonCurse the day your’re bornBut the pilot of your plane is youWe’re all in this world, by a greater plan Look up, lift your wings, Because you canThe Light Said (The First Song album)” - Phyllis Wheaton
89. “I try to be like a forest: revitalizing and constantly growing.” - Forest Whitaker
90. “Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.” - Raymond Lindquist
91. “Growth is an unavoidable part of life. Whether we mean for it to happen or not, our bodies continually nourish and regenerate themselves, our minds continually learn and expand, and our lives continually evolve. We have the power to craft our growth the way a landscaper crafts a majestic garden, or we can leave it to chance, allowing it to unfold wild as the weeds that spread across a vacant lot.” - Scott Edmund Miller
92. “There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.” - John Crowley
93. “The majority of people have successfully alienated themselves from change; they tediously arrange their lives into a familiar pattern, they give themselves to normalcy, they are proud if they are able to follow in auspicious footsteps set before them, they take pride in always coloring inside the lines and they feel secure if they belong to a batch of others who are like them. Now, if familiar patterns bore you, if normalcy passes before you unnoticed, if you want to create your own footsteps in the earth and leave your own handprints on the skies, if you are the one who doesn't mind the lines in the coloring book as much as others do, and perchance you do not cling to a flock for you to identify with, then you must be ready for adversity. If you are something extraordinary, you are going to always shock others and while they go about existing in their mundaneness which they call success, you're going to be flying around crazy in their skies and that scares them. People are afraid of change, afraid of being different, afraid of doing things and thinking things that aren't a part of their checkerboard game of a life. They only know the pieces and the moves in their games, and that's it. You're always going to find them in the place that you think you're going to find them in, and every time they think about you, you're going to give them a heart attack.” - C. JoyBell C.
94. “We are all broken and wounded in this world. Some choose to grow strong at the broken places.” - Harold J. Duarte-Bernhardt
95. “I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.” - Roman Payne
96. “The journey I'm taking is inside me. Just like blood travels down veins, what I'm seeing is my inner self and what seems threatening is just the echo of the fear in my heart.” - Haruki Murakami
97. “I am my own biggest critic. Before anyone else has criticized me, I have already criticized myself. But for the rest of my life, I am going to be with me and I don't want to spend my life with someone who is always critical. So I am going to stop being my own critic. It's high time that I accept all the great things about me.” - C. JoyBell C.
98. “There is no adversity that cannot bear a gift and no gift that cannot bring adversity.” - Mollie Marti
99. “Your greatest responsibility is to live a life that nourishes your highest truth.” - Mollie Marti
100. “Mastery is the breeding ground of fresh, creative passion.” - Mollie Marti
101. “That's what coming face-to-face with six months in the woods will do to you: as soon as you realize you have the chance to be a different person, you become one. You can forget who you are. This is no accident when you've spent miles wondering, with every labored step, Who is this person who has decided to try this?--wondering who you are. You have nothing but time to answer the question, to give a new account of yourself. Your only witness might be a blanket of cool moss on a sunny day, or a panorama of endless mountains, or a young doe gazing by the Trail. You've yet to discover that the journey is the destination. So you lose yourself, then you find yourself again, farther along.” - Winton Porter
102. “A Truthful Evaluation Of Yourself Gives Feedback For Growth and Success” - Brenda Johnson Padgitt
103. “The heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them, the sun of their microcosm, that upon which all growth depends, from which all power proceeds.” - William Harvey
104. “It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere.” - John Updike
105. “Once a year I need to hear you tell me how proud you are of me for growing a little more.” - Darnell Lamont Walker
106. “I'm as proud of my inconsistencies as I am my consistencies.” - Myles Horton
107. “I urge you: don't cut short these thought-trains of yours. Follow them through to their end. Your thoughts and your feelings. Follow them through and you will grow with them.” - J.M. Coetzee
108. “A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.” - Marcel Proust
109. “Jaime had never realised that trees made a sound when they grew, and no-one else had realised it either, because the sound is made over hundreds of years in waves of twenty-four hours from peak to peak. Speed it up, and the sound a tree makes is vrooom.” - Terry Pratchett
110. “We cannot grow when we are in shame, and we can't use shame to change ourselves or others.” - Brené Brown
111. “Our torments also may in length of timeBecome our Elements.” - John Milton
112. “It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it—if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy—the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.” - George Eliot
113. “It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory” - Victor Hugo
114. “No person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.” - Adrienne Rich
115. “Faith is born and sustained by the Word of God, and out of faith grows the flower of joy.” - John Piper
116. “Movement turns dead dogs into maggots and daisies, and flour butter sugar an egg and a tablespoon of milk into Abernethy biscuits, and spermatozoa and ovaries into fishy little plants growing babyward if we take no care to stop them.” - Alasdair Gray
117. “The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.” - Anais Nin
118. “Sustainability is a new idea to many people, and many find it hard to understand. But all over the world there are people who have entered into the exercise of imagining and bringing into being a sustainable world. They see it as a world to move toward not reluctantly, but joyfully, not with a sense of sacrifice, but a sense of adventure. A sustainable world could be very much better than the one we live in today.” - Donella H. Meadows Jorgen Randers Dennis Meadows
119. “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.” - George Santayana
120. “Growth comes in the aftermath of failure, not wild success.” - Mary DeMuth
121. “To be sure, I had, and have, spent the better part of my post-college life growing up in the public eye, with my shameful warts, big and ugly, looming there for the world to see; and it has been a mighty battle trying to be a man, a Black man, a human being, a responsible and consistent human being, as I have interfaced with my past and with my personal demons, with friends and lovers, with enemies and haters. As Tupac Shakur once famously said to me, “There is no placed called careful.” On the one hand, Tupac was right: There is not much room for error in America if you are a Black male in a society ostensibly bent on profiling your every move, eager to capitalize on your falling into this or that trap, particularly keen to swoop down on your self-inflicted mishaps. But by the same token, Tupac was wrong: There can be a place called careful, once one becomes aware of the world one lives in, its potential, its limitations, and if one is willing to struggle to create a new model, some new and alternative space outside and away from the larger universe, where one can be free enough to comprehend that even if the world seems aligned against you, you do not have to give the world the rope to hang you with.” - Kevin Powell
122. “Thought is creative - Fear attracts like energy - Love is all there is.” - Neale Donald Walsch
123. “In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.” - John Williams
124. “Let us never measure our religion by that of others, and think we are doing enough if we have gone beyond our neighbors.” - J.C. Ryle
125. “Suffering is one of life's great teachers.” - Bryant McGill
126. “Adapt to your surrounding but remain flexible for growing.” - Ashley Porter
127. “If we're growing, we're always going to be out of our comfort zone.” - John Maxwell
128. “My faith has strengthen. God has shown me through my son with Down syndrome to not take anything for granted. I'm more grateful.” - Yvonne Pierre
129. “True pain teaches us to grow. You aren't finished yet. Dylan needs you.” - Rebecca Salas
130. “Stepping out of one’s world or out of one’s habitual self is a transcendental experience. [...] If we seek transcendence, we may have many visions, but we will surely end where we started. If we opt for growth, we may have our moments of transcendence, but they will be peak experiences along the steady road to a richer and more secure self. (32-33)” - Alexander Lowen
131. “The quest for self improvement and personal growth is now an integral part of my life. I’m always looking for ways to increase my capacity to grow, develop and achieve more.And that means, I’m willing to read, observe, listen, discuss, research and do whatever it takes to become a better improved me. I hope you are too.” - Murali Murthy
132. “Something to remember... You only get one chance to grow and live, so make it Beautiful!” - Sierra Lawrimore
133. “All wisdom contracts then expands, contracts then expands. That is how consciousness evolves.” - S. Kelley Harrell
134. “re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.[From the preface to Leaves Grass]” - Walt Whitman
135. “And I hope she does not live in a dark world. Because even the most terrible loss doesn't have to make you darker; it can make you deeper.” - Augusten Burroughs
136. “People are never able to outperform their self-image.” - John C. Maxwell
137. “Life is now in session. Are you present?” - John C. Maxwell
138. “I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.” - Emily Carr
139. “I don’t believe in the Law of Attraction. There were things I wanted in my life that no amount of positive thinking was going to make it a reality for me. However, I have learned to believe in the Law of Tough Love. Life has thrown a dozen tragedies at me. I did what any Christian would do--prayed for the outcome I wanted, but God was tough and only gave me what I needed. I now realize that life is not about fulfilling a wish list; rather a need list. Good and bad experiences are on the horizon. How else does a person change, grow and evolve? And just like any warrior woman, I won’t simply survive-- but thrive!” - Shannon L. Alder
140. “No matter how many sins you make or how slow you travel back toward God's valley, you are still way ahead of a person who never made a mistake and doesn't know what it is like to climb out of a pit of shame and rise above their temptations.” - Shannon L. Alder
141. “Nothing is more foreign than the world of one's childhood when one has truly left it.” - Pär Lagerkvist
142. “You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.” - Charlotte Eriksson
143. “Our love is sharpened by the stone of our challenges and strengthened by the struggles of our growth.” - Steve Maraboli
144. “I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.” - Roger Zelazny
