Quotes about Growth

There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you - I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you.

The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

She has been better educated than her sister, and has a more receptive mind. It seems as though someone had sown in a bare field a sprinkling of history, poetry, and pictures, and every seed had shot up in a flowery tangle.

Ah, he would take her beyond---beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of her soul.

And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained; never quite the same height, yet never below it: generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of the change.

seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm fluidity of youth is chilled into its final shape. He

He went on to praise the company they had just left, declaring that he knew no better way for a young man to form his mind than by frequenting the society of men of conflicting views and equal capacity. "Nothing," said he, "is more injurious to the growth of character than to be secluded from argument and opposition; as nothing is healthier than to be obliged to find good reasons for one's beliefs on pain of surrendering them.

Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.

minnows who go to a whale to learn how to grow bigger are likely to be swallowed in the process.

Put a dozen relatively like-minded people into the same crisis and you will see a dozen different responses. Some are heroes; others are cowards. Some are leaders; others are followers. Some are optimistic; others despair. Some shake their fist at God; others quietly submit. You don't really know who you are until you have gone through suffering. We can measure our spiritual growth by the way we behave under pressure.

Hope will only grow in the ground of humility.