quotations about growth
Growing up doesn't happen automatically when we become parents. It takes a lifetime. No matter how long we live, we'll always need to grow. And we will never reach perfect maturity this side of heaven.
ETHEL L. HERR
Growing Up is a Family Affair
Optimism works in conjunction with your life energy, strengthening your roots and keeping you grounded, stimulating the growth of new shoots and the development of new branches that form your life, energizing the creation that is you.
DANA LIGHTMAN
Power Optimism
Being taught to avoid growing up doesn't help us launch into adulthood. At best, it leaves us hanging on the end of the diving board--stuck in the childishness and irresponsibility of adolescence. At worst, it leaves us floundering in the deep end of the pool--unprepared for the exciting challenges of life.
ALEX HARRIS & BRETT HARRIS
Do Hard Things
You can't force a thing to grow. You can't interfere with it. It's all hidden. It's all unseen. You just gotta wait til it pops up out of the ground. Tiny little shoot. Tiny little white shoot. All hairy and fragile. Strong enough. Strong enough to break the earth even. It's a miracle.
SAM SHEPARD
Buried Child
To grow and know what one is growing towards--that is the source of all strength and confidence in life.
JAMES BAILLIE
attributed, Forbes, 1954
Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
NORMAN MAILER
Western Review, winter 1959
Growing up is like narrowing imagined meanings into settled references, and where we cannot do that, we tend to dismiss the meanings themselves.
RANDALL E. AUXIER
"I'm Melting! Melting!", The Wizard of Oz and Philosophy
Growing up isn't easy for anyone. Life is not perfect. That being said, the could of/should of is all in the past. Truth be known, if we could go back and repeat the past, we would probably screw it up in some other way.
LINDA K. REED
Winter of 1950
Growth is the only evidence of life.
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
Apologia pro Vita Sua
Life is growth and motion; a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.
BROOKS ATKINSON
Once Around the Sun
Growing older is mandatory; growing up is optional.
ANONYMOUS
Failure makes you grow up if you learn how to deal with it, and after all, nobody can be a little kid forever. Sometimes though, when the failures become big enough, growing up doesn't work. Sometimes growing up is just a way to disappear.
AMANDA HARRIS
Rage
As far as I can see, growing up doesn't make you anything but drab.
STEPHEN GREENLEAF
Book Case
The toughest kind of acceptance is when we have to accept that there are certain things in life which can't be ours--no matter how hard we try. It's called growing up.... It's difficult--very, very difficult, but inevitable nevertheless. Worse, growing up doesn't only happen as we turn eighteen. Growing up happens as our soul keeps swallowing these depressing acceptances little by little, one at a time. For no acceptance can happen overnight. It's a bit-by-bit process.
NOVONEEL CHAKRABORTY
Forget Me Not, Stranger
Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
NORMAN MAILER
attributed, Ten Things Every Writer Needs to Know
Growing up doesn't mean dying to your joy. Joy is your eternal link to your aliveness. If you lose your sense of joy your life force is diminishing with every breath you take. Growing up is a natural process of learning how to manage your energy, in ever increasing ways, so your mind can make conscious choices that are congruent with your heart and soul. This relationship sustains your life and youthful vitality by maintaining a direct relationship with your joy.
KAY SNOW-DAVIS
Wheel of Life Cycles
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
ANAÏS NIN
The Diary of Anais Nin
Growing up isn't easy. You know, once you grow up, it's work, work, work.
W. Z. NELSON
Hurricane Summer
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Journey Home
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
KENNETH BOULDING
attributed, Energy reorganization act of 1973: Hearings, Ninety-third Congress, first session, on H.R. 11510