growth quotes from influential philosophers, authors and people
"Well-being is realized by small steps, but is truly no small thing."
34
"One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child."
52
"You must know your mind well enough to know that, given a set of circumstances that are threatening, your mind will find excuses to avoid and evade, not accept a confrontation of any kind."
140
"Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning. But fear is your best friend. Fear is like fire. If you learn to control it, you let it work for you. If you don't learn to control it, it'll destroy you and everything around you."
143
"Should you find a wise critic to point out your faults, follow him as you would a guide to hidden treasure."
179
"I didn't fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong."
191
"Strain, I now accepted, was good. Instead of seeing discomfort as a sensation to avoid, I began to understand it the same way that a body builder understands muscle burn: a sign that you're doing something right."
203
"If you're not focusing on becoming so good they can't ignore you, you're going to be left behind."
204
"Nothing ever is, but is always becoming."
343
"All things, all forms, are dissolved, and new forms appear. All living things undergo the change which we call death. If we call death an evil, then all change is an evil."
344
"Become who you are."
359
"A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength — life itself is will to power."
363
"Life is continually shedding something that wants to die."
366
"The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness."
535
"Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing."
583
"People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die."
626
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity."
989
"Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for."
1152
"You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked."
1153
"The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience."
1154
"The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering."
1155
"Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience."
1156
"Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it. To try to avoid pain is to give too many fucks about pain. In contrast, if you’re able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable."
1157
"All the time you’re saying to yourself, ‘I could do that, but I won’t’, — which is just another way of saying that you can’t."
1196
"Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point."
87
"Between stimulus and response, there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
337
"The singularity is the point at which exponential growth becomes infinite and technology becomes indistinguishable from magic."
387