Quotes about Growth

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

It takes six years to learn to live together, and get over the most furious fits of wishing you hadn't married him, and hating him, but after that he becomes a habit and a property and you stop bothering about it.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the environment. The unreasonable man adapts the environment to him. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. ~ George Bernard Shaw

We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.

If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for 'em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must first make a ball of yourself; that's where it is.

In the checkered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the winepress. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.

No, said Godfrey, with a keen decisiveness of tone, in contrast with his usually careless and unemphatic speech—there's debts we can't pay like money debts, by paying extra for the years that have slipped by. While I've been putting off and putting off, the trees have been growing—it's too late now. Marner was in the right in what he said about a man's turning away a blessing from his door: it falls to somebody else.

The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world.

We are children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that our little hurts will be made much of - to be content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other the more.

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.

The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength. We can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy than a painter or a musician can wish to return to his cruder manner, or a philosopher to his less complete formula.