Quotes about Growth

A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms.

Contemplation, sadly, helps you see your woundedness! That's why most people do not stay long with contemplative prayer, because it's not very glorious. It's a continual humiliation, realizing, "Oh my God, I did it again. I still don't know how to love!

We do not make or create our souls, we just grow them up.

If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego!

The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.

Unless you build your first house well, you will never leave it. To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.

In the first half of life, we fight the devil and have the illusion and inflation of "winning" now and then; in the second half of life, we always lose because we are invariably fighting God.

Without law in some form, and, also, without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily or naturally. We have to have something hard and half-good to rebel against.

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling or changing or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it is not working. It attaches to past and present, and fears the future.

New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.

No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place.

We don't think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.