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Writer's pictureJonno White

200 Deep Self Growth Quotes To Make You Think

1. “Life teaches you that you cannot attain real maturity until you are ready to accept this harsh knowledge, this limitation in yourself, and make the difficult adjustment. Either you must learn to allow someone else to meet the need, without bitterness or envy, and accept it; or somehow you must make yourself learn to meet it. If you refuse to accept the limitation in yourself, you will be unable to grow beyond this point.”


2. “THOUGHTS WHICH ARE MIXED WITH ANY OF THE FEELINGS OF EMOTIONS, CONSTITUTE A "MAGNETIC" FORCE WHICH ATTRACTS, FROM THE VIBRATIONS OF THE ETHER, OTHER SIMILAR, OR RELATED THOUGHTS. A thought thus "magnetized" with emotion may be compared to a seed which, when planted in fertile soil, germinates, grows, and multiplies itself over and over again, until that which was originally one small seed, becomes countless millions of seeds of the SAME BRAND! The ether is a great cosmic mass of eternal forces of vibration. It is made up of both destructive vibrations and constructive vibrations. It carries, at all times, vibrations of fear, poverty, disease, failure, misery; and vibrations of prosperity, health, success, and happiness, just as surely as it carries the sound of hundreds of orchestrations of music, and hundreds of human voices, all of which maintain their own individuality, and means of identification, through the medium of radio. From the great storehouse of the ether, the human mind is constantly attracting vibrations which harmonize with that which DOMINATES the human mind. Any thought, idea, plan, or purpose which one holds in one's mind attracts, from the vibrations of the ether, a host of its relatives, adds these "relatives" to its own force, and grows until it becomes the dominating, MOTIVATING MASTER of the individual in whose mind it has been housed.”


3. “Come from the heart, the true heart, not the head. When in doubt, choose the heart. This does not mean to deny your own experiences and that which you have empirically learned through the years. It means to trust your self to integrate intuition and experience. There is a balance, a harmony to be nurtured, between the head and the heart. When the intuition rings clear and true, loving impulses are favored.”


4. “like to make practices stimulating, fun, and, most of all, efficient. Coach Al McGuire once told me that his secret was not wasting anybody’s time. “If you can’t it get done in eight hours a day,” he said, “it’s not worth doing.” That’s been my philosophy ever since. Much of my thinking on this subject was influenced by the work of Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of humanistic psychology who is best known for his theory of the hierarchy of needs. Maslow believed that the highest human need is to achieve “self-actualization,” which he defined as “the full use and exploitation of one’s talents, capacities and potentialities.” The basic characteristics of self-actualizers, he discovered in his research, are spontaneity and naturalness, a greater acceptance of themselves and others, high levels of creativity, and a strong focus on problem solving rather than ego gratification. To achieve self-actualization, he concluded, you first need to satisfy a series of more basic needs, each building upon the other to form what is commonly referred to as Maslow’s pyramid. The bottom layer is made up of physiological urges (hunger, sleep, sex); followed by safety concerns (stability, order); love (belonging); self-esteem (self-respect, recognition); and finally self-actualization. Maslow concluded that most people fail to reach self-actualization because they get stuck somewhere lower on the pyramid. In his book The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, Maslow describes the key steps to attaining self-actualization: experiencing life “vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption”; making choices from moment to moment that foster growth rather than fear; becoming more attuned to your inner nature and acting in concert with who you are; being honest with yourself and taking responsibility for what you say and do instead of playing games or posing; identifying your ego defenses and finding the courage to give them up; developing the ability to determine your own destiny and daring to be different and non-conformist; creating an ongoing process for reaching your potential and doing the work needed to realize your vision. fostering the conditions for having peak experiences, or what Maslow calls “moments of ecstasy” in which we think, act, and feel more clearly and are more loving and accepting of others.”


5. “I almost died when Daddyo and I was involved in a serious car accident while driving from our Memphis stomping grounds to Chicago. It’s just certain sh*t, not only the car accident but my life as a whole, like, when you’re going too hard, you gotta tell yourself like, ‘Man, I gotta slow down.’ Then my grandma had passed and all that so, it was just everything leading up to me like, I’m grown now. I ain’t a kid no more. I got responsibilities I got to take on whether I like it or not. If I ain’t start rapping it’s like, I been coming close as hell, close as hell to death and fatal tragedies and sh*t, know what I’m saying? And it just made me open my eyes and start thinking smarter and being wiser.” – Young Dolph


6. “Go out of your way to find humility when things are going right and forgiveness/compassion when they go wrong. Because it’s never as good or as bad as it looks. The world is big and complex. Luck and risk are both real and hard to identify. Do so when judging both yourself and others. Respect the power of luck and risk and you’ll have a better chance of focusing on things you can actually control. You’ll also have a better chance of finding the right role models. Less ego, more wealth. Saving money is the gap between your ego and your income, and wealth is what you don’t see. So wealth is created by suppressing what you could buy today in order to have more stuff or more options in the future. No matter how much you earn, you will never build wealth unless you can put a lid on how much fun you can have with your money right now, today. Manage your money in a way that helps you sleep at night. That’s different from saying you should aim to earn the highest returns or save a specific percentage of your income. Some people won’t sleep well unless they’re earning the highest returns; others will only get a good rest if they’re conservatively invested. To each their own. But the foundation of, “does this help me sleep at night?” is the best universal guidepost for all financial decisions. If you want to do better as an investor, the single most powerful thing you can do is increase your time horizon. Time is the most powerful force in investing. It makes little things grow big and big mistakes fade away.”


7. “The top man in a company—especially in a small or fair-sized company that has been growing fast—is typically exceedingly proud of the men who work with him. And yet—and this is the infallible symptom of the need for change—not one of the “boys” is “quite ready yet.” When the time for change comes, he always finds good reasons for not moving this man to that bigger responsibility, for not turning over a key area to another man, and so on. He always says “so and so is the best man—but he is not quite ready.” This is a clear indication that the top man himself is not ready.”


8. “Each positive thought, every vibrant attitude, all purposeful activities water the seeds for success along your path. You will encounter many seeds for success today. Pay attention to these and feed them appropriately. Then maintain their beautiful growth through conscious self-care.” ― Rebecca Gordon


9. “Are you willing to stoop down and consider the needs and desires of little children; to remember the weaknesses and lonliness of people who are growing old; to stop asking how much your friends love you, and to ask yourself if you love them enough; to bear in mind the things that other people have to bear on their hearts; to trim your lamp so that it will give more light and less smoke, and to carry it in front so that your shadow will fall behind you; to make a grave for your ugly thougts and a garden for your kindly feelings, with the gate open? Are you willing to do these things for a day? Then you are ready to keep Christmas!”


10. “If he is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. 22. If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. [Wang Tzu, quoted by Tu Yu, says that the good tactician plays with his adversary as a cat plays with a mouse, first feigning weakness and immobility, and then suddenly pouncing upon him.] 23. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. [This is probably the meaning though Mei Yao-ch’en has the note: “while we are taking our ease, wait for the enemy to tire himself out.” The YU LAN has “Lure him on and tire him out.”] If his forces are united, separate them. [Less plausible is the interpretation favored by most of the commentators: “If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them.”] 24. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected. 25. These military devices, leading to victory, must not be divulged beforehand. 26. Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. [Chang Yu tells us that in ancient times it was customary for a temple to be set apart for the use of a general who was about to take the field, in order that he might there elaborate his plan of campaign.] The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat: how much more no calculation at all! It is by attention to this point that I can foresee who is likely to win or lose.”


11. “If you were raised by parents who continually told you what a good person you were, who loved you, encouraged you, supported you, and believed in you, no matter what you did or didn’t do, you would grow up with the belief that you were a good and valuable person. By the age of three, this belief would lock in and become a fundamental part of the way you view yourself in relation to your world. Thereafter, no matter what happens to you, you would hold to this belief. It would become your reality. If you were raised by parents who did not know how powerful their words and behaviors could be in shaping your personality, they could very easily have used destructive criticism, disapproval, and physical or emotional punishment to discipline or control you. When a child is continually criticized at an early age, he soon concludes that there is something wrong with him. He doesn’t understand why it is that he is being criticized or punished, but he assumes that his parents know the truth about him, and that he deserves it. He begins to feel that he is not valuable or lovable. He is not worth very much. He must therefore be worthless.”


12. “The manner in which we speak is exceedingly important. An ancient sage once said, “A soft answer turns away anger.” When your spouse is angry and upset and lashing out words of heat, if you choose to be loving, you will not reciprocate with additional heat but with a soft voice. You will receive what he is saying as information about his emotional feelings. You will let him tell you of his hurt, anger, and perception of events. You will seek to put yourself in his shoes and see the event through his eyes and then express softly and kindly your understanding of why he feels that way. If you have wronged him, you will be willing to confess the wrong and ask forgiveness. If your motivation is different from what he is reading, you will be able to explain your motivation kindly. You will seek understanding and reconciliation, and not to prove your own perception as the only logical way to interpret what has happened. That is mature love—love to which we aspire if we seek a growing marriage.”


13. You deserve to be in spaces and relationships that make you happy; that feed your soul and help you grow. You are worthy of connections that are loving, nourishing, kind and authentic. Before you settle for anything less than, remind yourself that the places you visit and people you journey with through life should make you feel safe, loved and enough. – Alex Elle


14. “I always did something that I was a little not ready to do. I think that is how you grow. When there’s a moment of ‘Wow, I’m not so sure that I can do this,’ and you push through those moments, it’s then that you have a breakthrough. Sometimes that’s a sign that something really great is about to happen. You’re about to grow and learn a lot more about yourself.” – Marissa Mayer, former President and CEO of Yahoo


15. “I had hit a personal low. I was out of work for the first time since I was seventeen. I had no job, a blank date book, and so much time on my hands I could lunch with the girls. Sure, I had money. But I was also a bit lost. The kids were grown and living their own lives. Without work, which had been central to my identity and my self-esteem for so many years, I was no longer sure who I was. I had been retired for two months, and already I was panicked.”


16. “A teacher must busy herself with finding more and more new names to satisfy the insatiable demands of her young charges. This craving which is manifested in their writing is certainly natural. Between the ages of three and five a child's vocabulary grows spontaneously from three hundred to three thousand or more words. ”


17. “People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you’re fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly.” – Elizabeth Gilbert


18. “I must say that, beyond occasionally exposing me to laughter, my constitutional shyness has been no dis-advantage whatever. In fact I can see that, on the contrary, it has been all to my advantage. My hesitancy in speech, which was once an annoyance, is now a pleasure. Its greatest benefit has been that it has taught me the economy of words. I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts. And I can now give myself the certificate that a thoughtless word hardly ever escapes my tongue or pen. I do not recollect ever having had to regret anything in my speech or writing. I have thus been spared many a mishap and waste of time. Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. Proneness to exaggerate, to suppress or modify the truth, wittingly or unwittingly, is a natural weakness of man, and silence is necessary in order to surmount it. A man of few words will rarely be thoughtless in his speech; he will measure every word. We find so many people impatient to talk. There is no chairman of a meeting who is not pestered with notes for permission to speak. And whenever the permission is given the speaker generally exceeds the time-limit, asks for more time, and keeps on talking without permission. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth.”


19. “The urge towards growth lies within the child himself – his intelligence and character will grow whatever we may do, but we can help or hinder the growth. The child in the overluxurious nursery with too many toys and distractions and the irksomeness of constant supervision is like a young plant that is overwatered – the soil turns sour and the plant becomes sickly. ”


20. “Having the strength to pull yourself away from the toxicity and surrounding yourself with all the nourishing things you need to grow is a huge accomplishment. although not everybody has supporting family and friends in this new world of ours, but that doesn't mean you should give up, there is a whole world out there full of great people willing to help you succeed you just have to learn how to surround yourself with them and appreciate them, not use them for your own selfishness. And then my friend you have learned a life lesson <3 <3 <3”


21. “Inside-out” means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self—with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. It says if you want to have a happy marriage, be the kind of person who generates positive energy and sidesteps negative energy rather than empowering it. If you want to have a more pleasant, cooperative teenager, be a more understanding, empathic, consistent, loving parent. If you want to have more freedom, more latitude in your job, be a more responsible, a more helpful, a more contributing employee. If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy. If you want the secondary greatness of recognized talent, focus first on primary greatness of character. The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves precedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves. Inside-out is a process—a continuing process of renewal based on the natural laws that govern human growth and progress. It’s an upward spiral of growth that leads to progressively higher forms of responsible independence and effective interdependence.”


22. “If you have great people around you, they will take you higher than your dream will. Leaders are never self-made. Those closest to you determine your level of success, so choosing the right companions as partners in pursuit of your vision is an important decision. My advice is to surround yourself with talented people who will challenge you, help you grow and inspire you to maximize your potential.” ~ John C. Maxwell


23. “By the time it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up so that it was almost a river, and being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, “There is no hurry. We shall get there someday.” – A. A. Milne


24. “One might say that the ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all. Without it, improvement is impossible. And certainly, ego makes it difficult every step of the way. It is certainly more pleasurable to focus on our talents and strengths, but where does that get us? Arrogance and self-absorption inhibit growth. So does fantasy and ‘vision.’ ”


25. “To become a 360-Degree Leader, you will have to pay a price. You will have to give up other opportunities in order to lead. You will have to sacrifice some personal goals for the sake of others. You will have to get out of your comfort zone and do things you’ve never done before. You will have to keep learning and growing when you don’t feel like it. You will have to repeatedly put others ahead of yourself. And if you desire to be a really good leader, you will have to do these things without fanfare or complaint.”


26. “When you move toward mastery, your brain becomes radically altered by the years of practice and active experimentation. It is no longer the simple ecosystem of years gone by. The brain of a Master is so richly interconnected that it comes to resemble the physical world, and becomes a vibrant ecosystem in which all forms of thinking associate and connect. This growing similarity between the brain and complex life itself represents the ultimate return to reality.”


27. “But I worked 8:00am to 5:00pm and literally I’d come home, I get a bite to eat, and then I start my work at 6:00p.m or 6:30pm and I go until 2:00 a.m. I’d get another seven or eight hours in. And that’s how I built everything at the beginning. That’s honestly what’s required. And to not do that is to cheat yourself because in the end. What we get will never make us happy. How many stars in your chart, how many Academy Awards, how much money you make, what makes us happiest? Progress. Progress equals happiness if you’re not growing, you’re dying inside. […] So the mindset has to be – this is the way I live going forward. I am a learning machine. And that makes people fulfilled because you become more. You’re not just doing something because you have or because you’re trying to keep up.”


28. “Because it begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real; because at last I have cursed myself; because after my fantastic nights I have moments of returning sobriety, which are awful! Meanwhile, you hear the whirl and roar of the crowd in the vortex of life around you; you hear, you see, men living in reality; you see that life for them is not forbidden, that their life does not float away like a dream, like a vision; that their life is being eternally renewed, eternally youthful, and not one hour of it is the same as another; while fancy is so spiritless, monotonous to vulgarity and easily scared, the slave of shadows, of the idea, the slave of the first cloud that shrouds the sun... One feels that this inexhaustible fancy is weary at last and worn out with continual exercise, because one is growing into manhood, outgrowing one's old ideals: they are being shattered into fragments, into dust; if there is no other life one must build one up from the fragments. And meanwhile the soul longs and craves for something else! And in vain the dreamer rakes over his old dreams, as though seeking a spark among the embers, to fan them into flame, to warm his chilled heart by the rekindled fire, and to rouse up in it again all that was so sweet, that touched his heart, that set his blood boiling, drew tears from his eyes, and so luxuriously deceived him!”


29. “You can expand your awareness in many ways, and as you do, your brain will evolve. It will grow physically by developing new neural pathways, synaptic connections, and even new brain cells. Perhaps more importantly, it will evolve to mirror the expansion of your mind into new, creative areas.” — Deepak Chopra


30. “Having a Grand Slam offer makes it almost impossible to lose. But why? What gives it such an impact? In short, having a Grand Slam Offer helps with all three of the requirements for growth: getting more customers, getting them to pay more, and getting them to do so more times. How? It allows you to differentiate yourself from the marketplace. In other words, it allows you to sell your product based on VALUE not on PRICE. Commoditized = Price Driven Purchases (race to the bottom) Differentiated = Value Driven Purchases (sell in a category of one with no comparison. Yes, market matters, which I will expound on in the next chapter) A commodity, as I define it, is a product available from many places. For that reason, it’s prone to purchases based on “price” instead of “value.” If all products are “equal,” then the cheapest one is the most valuable by default. In other words, if a prospect compares your product to another and thinks “these are pretty much the same, I’ll buy the cheaper one,” then they commoditized you. How embarrassing! But”


31. “The "non-profit" institution neither supplies goods or services not controls. Its "product" is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their "product" is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.”


32. “Positive Eye Contact Quality time should include loving eye contact. Looking in your child’s eyes with care is a powerful way to convey love from your heart to the heart of your child. Studies have shown that most parents use eye contact in primarily negative ways, either while reprimanding a child or giving very explicit instructions. If you give loving looks only when your child is pleasing you, you are falling into the trap of conditional love. That can damage your child’s personal growth. You want to give enough unconditional love to keep your child’s emotional tank full, and a key way to do this is through proper use of eye contact. Sometimes family members refuse to look at one another as a means of punishment. This is destructive to both adults and children. Kids especially interpret withdrawal of eye contact as disapproval, and this further erodes their self-esteem. Don’t let your demonstration of”


33. “experiencing life “vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption”; making choices from moment to moment that foster growth rather than fear; becoming more attuned to your inner nature and acting in concert with who you are; being honest with yourself and taking responsibility for what you say and do instead of playing games or posing; identifying your ego defenses and finding the courage to give them up; developing the ability to determine your own destiny and daring to be different and non-conformist; creating an ongoing process for reaching your potential and doing the work needed to realize your vision. fostering the conditions for having peak experiences, or what Maslow calls “moments of ecstasy” in which we think, act, and feel more clearly and are more loving and accepting of others.”


34. “The best leaders understand the motivations of their team members and know their people – their lives and their families. But a leader must never grow so close to subordinates that one member of the team becomes more important than another, or more important than the mission itself.”~Jocko Willink , Jocko Willink quotes on leadership


35. “Therefore, don’t make it your personal mission to change people’s image of you. People are entitled to their beliefs and values, and they have the right to dislike you. They are free to interpret your actions and behaviors through their own filter. Part of your personal growth is to accept you don’t have to be liked by everybody, and finally, you can be yourself.”


36. “Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles, and less-than-perfect conditions. So what? Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident, and more and more successful.” -Mark Victor Hansen


37. “In other words, when we truly love others without condition, without strings, we help them feel secure and safe and validated and affirmed in their essential worth, identity, and integrity. Their natural growth process is encouraged. We make it easier for them to live the laws of life—cooperation, contribution, self-discipline, integrity—and to discover and live true to the highest and best within them.”


38. When you sin, do a thorough job of repenting. Re-hate sin all over again. Consecrate yourself afresh to the Holy Spirit and his pure ways. But reject the devil’s whisper that God’s tender heart for you has grown a little colder, a little stiffer. He is not flustered by your sinfulness. His deepest disappointment is with your tepid thoughts of his heart. Christ died, placarding before you the love of God.


39. “Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges. obstacles. and less than perfect conditions. So what? Get started now. With each step you take. you will grow stronger and stronger. more and more skilled. more and more self-confident. and more and more successful.” –Mark Victor Hansen


40. “Calculation of the Past Growth Rate It is of prime importance that the growth factor in a company’s record be taken adequately into account. Where the growth has been large the recent earnings will be well above the seven-or ten-year average, and analysts may deem these long-term figures irrelevant. This need not be the case. The earnings can be given in terms both of the average and the latest figure. We suggest that the growth rate itself be calculated by comparing the average of the last three years with corresponding figures ten years earlier.”


41. “When I was growing up, my dad would encourage my brother and I to fail. We would be sitting at the dinner table and he would ask, 'So what did you guys fail at this week?' If we didn't have something to contribute, he would be disappointed. When I did fail at something, he'd high-five me. What I didn't realize at the time was that he was completely reframing my definition of failure at a young age. To me, failure means not trying; failure isn't the outcome. If I have to look at myself in the mirror and say, 'I didn't try that because I was scared,' that is failure.”


42. “When I was growing up, my dad would encourage my brother and I to fail. We would be sitting at the dinner table and he would ask, ‘So what did you guys fail at this week?’ If we didn’t have something to contribute, he would be disappointed. When I did fail at something, he’d high-five me. What I didn’t realize at the time was that he was completely re-framing my definition of failure at a young age. To me, failure means not trying; failure isn’t the outcome. If I have to look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘I didn’t try that because I was scared,’ that is failure.” – Sara Blakely


43. “You’d best change your point of view. Stop blaming me and thinking I’m the problem. If you think I’m the problem, then you have to change me. If you realize that you’re the problem, then you can change yourself, learn something, and grow wiser. Most people want everyone else in the world to change but themselves. Let me tell you, it’s easier to change yourself than everyone else.”


44. “I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.”


45. “IF, like those with the growth mindset, you believe you can develop yourself, then you're open to accurate information about your current abilities, even it it's unflattering. What's more, if you're oriented toward learning, as they are, you need accurate information about your current abilities in order to learn effectively”


46. “The manner in which we speak is exceedingly important. An ancient sage once said, 'A soft answer turns away anger.' When your spouse is angry and upset and lashing out words of heat, if you choose to be loving, you will not reciprocate with additional heat but with a soft voice. You will receive what he is saying as information about his emotional feelings. You will let him tell you of his hurt, anger, and perception of events. You will seek to put yourself in his shoes and see the event through his eyes and then express softly and kindly your understanding of why he feels that way. If you have wronged him, you will be willing to confess the wrong and ask forgiveness. If your motivation is different from what he is reading, you will be able to explain your motivation kindly. You will seek understanding and reconciliation, and not to prove your own perception as the only logical way to interpret what has happened. That is mature love--love to which we aspire if we seek a growing marriage.”


47. “I almost died when Daddyo and I was involved in a serious car accident while driving from our Memphis stomping grounds to Chicago. It’s just certain sh*t, not only the car accident but my life as a whole, like, when you’re going too hard, you gotta tell yourself like, ‘Man, I gotta slow down.’ Then my grandma had passed and all that so, it was just everything leading up to me like, I’m grown now. I ain’t a kid no more. I got responsibilities I got to take on whether I like it or not. If I ain’t start rapping it’s like, I been coming close as hell, close as hell to death and fatal tragedies and sh*t, know what I’m saying? And it just made me open my eyes and start thinking smarter and being wiser.”


48. “The visionary and the integrator couldn’t be more different. In a small to mid-size company, the visionary is typically the owner, co-owner, or founder. In a partnership, most of the time, one partner is the visionary and the other is the integrator. It’s a dynamic that has elevated them to where they are. The visionary typically has 10 new ideas a week. Nine of them might not be so great, but one usually is, and it’s that one idea each week that keeps the organization growing. For this reason, visionaries are invaluable. They’re typically very creative. They’re great solvers of big ugly problems (not the little practical ones), and fantastic with important clients, vendors, suppliers, and banking relationships. The culture of the organization is very important to them, because they usually operate more on emotion and therefore have a better barometer of how people are feeling. If you’re one, know thyself and be free.”


49. “One of the greatest barriers to going back is related to empathy. If our goal is perfection rather than growth, it is unlikely that we are willing to go back, because it requires a level of self-empathy—the ability to look at our own actions with understanding and compassion; to understand our experiences in the context in which they happened and to do all this without judgment.”


50. “His Message at a High School Commencement “You guys are programmed to succeed. The hardest thing you’re ever going to do in your life is fail at something, and if you don’t start failing at things, you will not live a full life. You’ll be living a cautious life on a path that you know is pretty much guaranteed to more or less work. That’s not getting the most out of this amazing world we live in. You have to do the hardest thing that you have not been prepared for in this school or any school: You have to be prepared to fail. That’s how you’re going to expand yourself and grow. As you work through that process of failure and learning, you will really deepen into the human being you’re capable of being.”


51. “The top man who concludes that his company needs to grow but who also then realizes that he does not want to change himself and his behavior has, in conscience, only one line of action open to him. He has to step aside. Even if he legally owns the company, he does not own the lives of other people. A company is not a child—and even with a human child, the time comes when the parent has to accept that the child has grown up and needs to be independent and on his own.”


52. “Resentment will subsist as long as your need for being right and getting even is more important than your peace of mind. It will keep growing as long as you keep feeding the emotion with thoughts of resentment. And it will remain as long as you repress it. That’s why it’s important you make your peace of mind a priority and learn to forgive others as well as yourself.”


53. “Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.”


54. “One of the key principles in Kintsugi is “Kansha” or expressing gratitude. As part of my pledge is to continuously design interventions and activities that will make the whole organization intentional in giving gratitude for their work, their colleagues and their leaders. By building this culture and mindset, I can contribute in helping the organization develop self leaders who are more positive, resilient, adaptable to change and continuous growth.” – Denise Escanillas Ramos


55. “You deserve to be in spaces and relationships that make you happy; that feed your soul and help you grow. You are worthy of connections that are loving. nourishing. kind and authentic. Before you settle for anything less than. remind yourself that the places you visit and people you journey with through life should make you feel safe. loved and enough.” – Alex Elle


56. “Self-transformation commences with a period of self-questioning. Questions lead to more questions, bewilderment leads to new discoveries, and growing personal awareness leads to transformation in how a person lives. Purposeful modification of the self only commences with revising our mind’s internal functions. Revamped internal functions eventually alter how we view our external environment.”


57. “Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain. If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation goes, you can't farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops. The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community. But a herdsman is off by himself. Farmers also don't have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night, because crops can't easily be stolen unless, of course, a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field on his own. But a herdsman does have to worry. He's under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds, that he is not weak.”


58. “I had to grow to love my body. I did not have a good self-image at first. Finally, it occurred to me, I’m either going to love me or hate me. And I chose to love myself. Then everything kind of sprung from there. Things that I thought weren’t attractive became sexy. Confidence makes you sexy.” – Queen Latifah


59. “Now the little child who manifests perseverance in his work as the first constructive act of his psychical life, and upon this act builds up internal order, equilibrium, and the growth of personality, demonstrates, almost as in a splendid revelation, the true manner in which [an adult] renders himself valuable to the community. ”


60. “I often look at my life and ask, “Well, here’s what I want, but am I willing to become the kind of person it will take?” If I’m too lazy, if I’m not willing to learn, read, study, and grow to become what I must become,then I cannot expect to attract what I want. Now, when faced with a choice, I must decide to either change myself or change my wants.”


61. “People generally fear conflict, so they avoid useful arguments out of fear that the tone will escalate into personal attacks they cannot handle. People in close relationships often avoid making their own interests known and instead compromise across the board to avoid being perceived as greedy or self-interested. They fold, they grow bitter, and they grow apart. We’ve all heard of marriages that ended in divorce and the couple never fought.”


62. “The ability for any organization to build new leaders is very important. Think of an organization like a plant. No matter how strong it is, no matter how tall it grows, if it cannot make new seeds, if it is unable to produce new leaders, then its ability to thrive for generations beyond is nil. One of the primary jobs of any leader is to make new leaders. To help grow the kind of leaders who know how to build organizations equipped for the Infinite Game. However, if the current leaders are more focused on making their plant as big as possible, then, like a weed, it will do whatever it needs to do to grow. Regardless of the impact it has on the garden (or even the long-term prospects of the plant itself).”


63. “Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.”


64. “You are Life passing through your body, passing through your mind, passing through your soul. Once you find that out, not with logic, not with the intellect, but because you can feel that Life—you find out that you are the force that makes the flowers open and close, that makes the hummingbird fly from flower to flower. You find out that you are in every tree, and you are in every animal, vegetable, and rock. You are that force that moves the wind and breathes through your body. The whole universe is a living being that is moved by that force, and that is what you are. You are Life.”– Don Miguel Ruiz


65. “Yes, I decided, a man can truly change. The events of the past year have taught me much about myself, and a few universal truths. I learned, for instance, that while wounds can be inflicted easily upon those we love, it's often much more difficult to heal them. Yet the process of healing those wounds provided the richest experience of my life, leading me to believe that while I've often overestimated what I could accomplish in a day, I had underestimated what I could do in a year. But most of all, I learned that it's possible for two people to fall in love all over again, even when there's been a lifetime of disappointment between them.”


66. “Ahimsa is a comprehensive principle. We are helpless mortals caught in the conflagration of himsa. The saying that life lives on life has a deep meaning in it. Man cannot for a moment live without consciously or unconsciously committing outward himsa. The very fact of his living - eating, drinking and moving about - necessarily involves some himsa, destruction of life, be it ever so minute. A votary of ahimsa therefore remains true to his faith if the spring of all his actions is compassion, if he shuns to the best of his ability the destruction of the tiniest creature, tries to save it, and thus incessantly strives to be free from the deadly coil of himsa. He will be constantly growing in self-restraint and compassion, but he can never become entirely free from outward himsa.


67. “So what is the difference between “power thinking” and “positive” thinking? The distinction is slight but profound. To me, people use positive thinking to pretend that everything is rosy, when they really believe that it’s not. With power thinking, we understand that everything is neutral, that nothing has meaning except for the meaning we give it, and that we are going to make up a story and give something it’s meaning.” – T. Harv Eker


68. “Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.” Wendell Berry


69. “Yet despite these offensive reasons to scale, the most common driver of blitzscaling is the threat of competition. Even without competition, you would still want to achieve first-scaler advantage and climb the learning curve, but you might prefer the less risky fastscaling approach to growth. Ask yourself, “Can somebody else realize this opportunity before me?” If the answer is yes, moving faster probably reduces the risk of competition more than it raises the risk of failure. The more intense the competition, the faster you should try to move.”


70. I had to grow to love my body. I did not have a good self-image at first. Finally it occurred to me, I’m either going to love me or hate me. And I chose to love myself. Then everything kind of sprung from there. Things that I thought weren’t attractive became sexy. Confidence makes you sexy.” – Queen Latifah


71. “A loving relationship is one in which the loved one is free to be himself — to laugh with me, but never at me; to cry with me, but never because of me; to love life, to love himself, to love being loved. Such a relationship is based upon freedom and can never grow in a jealous heart.” ~ Leo F. Buscaglia


72. Why waste time proving over and over how great you are when you could get better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek the tried and true instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking


73. “Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year has gone by and how little we’ve grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, with each flicker of the candles on the cake, we know it’s not to be, that for the rest of our sad, wretched pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably; happy birthday? No such thing.” ~ Jerry Seinfeld


74. “The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning “heart.” Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.” – Rollo May


75. “The test of a successful person is not an ability to eliminate all problems before they arise, but to meet and work out difficulties when they do arise. We must be willing to make an intelligent compromise with perfection lest we wait forever before taking action. It is still good advice to cross bridges when we come to them.”


76. “The ability to stick around for a long time, without wiping out or being forced to give up, is what makes the biggest difference. This should be the cornerstone of your strategy, whether it’s in investing or your career or a business you own. There are two reasons why a survival mentality is so key with money. One is the obvious: few gains are so great that they’re worth wiping yourself out over. The other is the counterintuitive math of compounding. Compounding only works if you can give an asset years and years to grow.”


77. “BARGAIN-ISSUE PATTERN IN SECONDARY COMPANIES. We have defined a secondary company as one that is not a leader in a fairly important industry. Thus it is usually one of the smaller concerns in its field, but it may equally well be the chief unit in an unimportant line. By way of exception, any company that has established itself as a growth stock is not ordinarily considered “secondary.” In the great bull market of the 1920s relatively little distinction was drawn between industry leaders and other listed issues, provided the latter were of respectable size. The public felt that a middle-sized company was strong enough to weather storms and that it had a better chance for really spectacular expansion than one that was already of major dimensions. The depression years 1931–32, however, had a particularly devastating impact on the companies below the first rank either in size or in inherent stability. As a result of that experience investors have since developed a pronounced preference for industry leaders and a corresponding lack of interest most of the time in the ordinary company of secondary importance. This has meant that the latter group have usually sold at much lower prices in relation to earnings and assets than have the former. It has meant further that in many instances the price has fallen so low as to establish the issue in the bargain class. When investors rejected the stocks of secondary companies, even though these sold at relatively low prices, they were expressing a belief or fear that such companies faced a dismal future. In fact, at least subconsciously, they calculated that any price was too high for them because they were heading for extinction—just as in 1929 the companion theory for the “blue chips” was that no price was too high for them because their future possibilities were limitless. Both of these views were exaggerations and were productive of serious investment errors. Actually, the typical middle-sized listed company is a large one when compared with the average privately owned business. There is no sound reason why such companies should not continue indefinitely in operation, undergoing the vicissitudes characteristic of our economy but earning on the whole a fair return on their invested capital.”


78. “The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning ‘heart.’ Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage, other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.” – Rollo May


79. “By the time it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, “There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”


80. At your birth, a seed is planted. That seed is your uniqueness. It wants to grow, transform itself, and flower to its full potential. It has a natural, assertive energy to it. Your life’s task is to bring that seed to flower, to express your uniqueness through your work. You have a destiny to fulfill. The stronger you feel and maintain it — as a force, a voice or in whatever form — the greater your chance of fulfilling this life’s task and achieving mastery.” — Robert Greene, Mastery


81. “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”


82. Apply the lessons of the quotes to your life: After reflecting on the meaning of the quotes, think about how you can apply the lessons they offer to your own life. What changes can you make to grow and improve? What actions can you take to align yourself with the principles and values expressed in the quotes?


83. “Find out who you are and figure out what you believe in. Even if it’s different from what your neighbors believe in and different from what your parents believe in. Stay true to yourself. Have your own opinion. Don’t worry about what people say about you or think about you. Let the naysayers nay. They will eventually grow tired of naying.” ~ Ellen DeGeneres


84. “You must see every setback, failure, or hardship as a trial along the way, as seeds that are being planted for further cultivation, if you know how to grow them. No moment is wasted if you pay attention and learn the lessons contained in every experience. By constantly applying yourself to the subject that suits your inclinations and attacking it from many different angles, you are simply enriching the ground for these seeds to take root. You may not see this process in the present, but it is happening. Never losing your connection to your Life’s Task, you will unconsciously hit upon the right choices in your life. Over time, mastery will come to you.”


85. “Dedicating some time to meditation is a meaningful expression of caring for yourself that can help you move through the mire of feeling unworthy of recovery. As your mind grows quieter and more spacious, you can begin to see self-defeating thought patterns for what they are, and open up to other, more positive options.” — Sharon Salzberg


86. Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. – Wendell Berry


87. "If you find yourself saying ‘I can’t do something,’ but you know it in your heart of hearts that if you do it, you’re going to grow, you’re going to be a better person, it’s going to contribute to your family or to your kids or to something that matters, and you keep saying ‘I can’t do it,’ there is no question — you must do it. You don’t discuss it anymore. You just take immediate action… You do what’s necessary."


88. “To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you're so engrossed in what you're doing you don't notice–it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos.”


89. “People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you’re fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly.” — Elizabeth Gilbert


90. “Because that’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time.”


91. “What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.”


92. Sometimes it is when you become exhausted of your old habits where you then observe all the dislikes in your life and you begin living more consciously. You realize that you have a choice in every matter. That your life becomes that which you focus on and that at any time you can assert your personal will power to become what you want to be and not become what the outside circumstances may attempt to mold you into.” ― Jason Micheal Ratliff


93. “Our relationships and friendships often reflect where we are in life at the moment, and sometimes when you evolve sooner than you were prepared for, the only way to complete the process is to remove people from your life who only remind you of the version of yourself you have since outgrown...This is why I am strongly against helping to build men up in a world where they are averse to anything that reminds them of their struggle.”


94. “If the investor is to rely chiefly on the advice of others in handling his funds, then either he must limit himself and his advisers strictly to standard, conservative, and even unimaginative forms of investment, or he must have an unusually intimate and favorable knowledge of the person who is going to direct his funds into other channels. But if the ordinary business or professional relationship exists between the investor and his advisers, he can be receptive to less conventional suggestions only to the extent that he himself has grown in knowledge and experience and has therefore become competent to pass independent judgment on the recommendations of others. He has then passed from the category of defensive or unenterprising investor into that of aggressive or enterprising investor.”


95. “To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t notice—it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos.”


96. “Love yourself enough to create an environment in your life that is conducive to the nourishment of your personal growth. Allow yourself to let go of the people, thoughts, and situations that poison your well-being. Cultivate a vibrant surrounding and commit yourself to making choices that will help you release the greatest expression of your unique beauty and purpose.” Steve Maraboli


97. “At your birth a seed is planted. That seed is your uniqueness. It wants to grow, transform itself, and flower to its full potential. It has a natural, assertive energy to it. Your Life's Task is to bring that seed to flower, to express your uniqueness through your work. You have a destiny to fulfill. The stronger you feel and maintain it--as a force, a voice or in whatever form-- the greater your chance of fulfilling this Life's Task and achieving mastery.”


98. To my brother in law, I know that you were feeling down about things lately. Now that you’re a father yourself, I think it’s natural that there are moments when you feel like life just got away from you. From the bottom of my heart, I want to let you know how much I’ve enjoyed watching you grow over the years and how proud our family is of all that you have accomplished despite many obstacles along the way. I wish we lived closer so we could see each other more often, but please know that you have a place in all of our hearts no matter what distance separates us.


99. “You will never be able to end any battle if the people involved are unable to see their own hypocrisy, or how their insecurity contributed to their problems. Wounded people often choose to play the victim, so they can restore their dignity in unhealthy ways. Sadly, they do this through feeling justified, by making bad choices or actions (that honestly no diety would want them to do). This inability to accept their part in their unhappiness keeps them from growing. They need your prayers more than your anger. Just walk away. Let it go and pray that one day they will understand your pain, as much as you do theirs. Remember: The sexiest woman alive is one that can walk away from a place that God doesn't want them to be. Do so with your head held high and forgive yourself and others. When you can do this, you will know what God's definition of class is-- YOU!”


100. “Once the child can speak, he can express himself and no longer depends on others to guess his needs. He finds himself in touch with human society, for people can only communicate by means of language.... Very soon afterward, at one year of age, the child begins to walk.... So man develops by stages, and the freedom he enjoys comes from these steps towards independence taken in turn... Truly it is nature which affords the child the opportunity to grow; it is nature which bestows independence upon him and guides him to success in achieving his freedom. ”


101. “We should expect hope’s reciprocity as a natural flowering of the life of hope. Helping others and nurturing hope is expressive of hopefulness itself. It is an extension of the hopeful self to reach out to others, promoting the connection of agency and the enrichment of horizons of meaning. Hope’s reciprocity grows out of the very social nature of hope; we thus frequently see it live in family relations, in intimacy, in love. And so hope spreads. This spreading should not surprise us; like love, it is freely given, fostered, and nurtured.” ~ Patrick Shade


102. “spontaneity begin to deteriorate. The goose gets sicker day by day. And what about a parent’s relationship with a child? When children are little, they are very dependent, very vulnerable. It becomes so easy to neglect the PC work—the training, the communicating, the relating, the listening. It’s easy to take advantage, to manipulate, to get what you want the way you want it—right now! You’re bigger, you’re smarter, and you’re right! So why not just tell them what to do? If necessary, yell at them, intimidate them, insist on your way. Or you can indulge them. You can go for the golden egg of popularity, of pleasing them, giving them their way all the time. Then they grow up without any internal sense of standards or expectations, without a personal commitment to being disciplined or responsible. Either way—authoritarian or permissive—you have the golden egg mentality. You want to have your way or you want to be liked. But what happens, meantime, to the goose? What sense of responsibility, of self-discipline, of confidence in the ability to make good choices or achieve important goals is a child going to have a few years down the road? And what about your relationship? When he reaches those critical teenage”


103. “God isn't a place of fresh starts. He isn't a hideout. He is not a destination. He is not a clean break. He is not a cop out for indecision. He is not a straight line. He is a circle. He will take you back to whatever you ran from if he needs you to heal your scars and others. He is a God of justice and compassion. The greatest growth a soul can experience doesn't come from doing service to strangers that have no impact on your life. It comes from doing service to people that have hurt you or you have hurt them. To truly devote yourself to God is to travel down roads that are hard to revisit. However, he will keep taking you there, until you have healed yourself or others.”


104. “Be alone. Eat alone. take yourself on dates. sleep alone. In the midst of this you will learn about yourself. You will grow. you will figure out what inspires you. you will curate your own dreams. your own beliefs. your own stunning clarity and when you do meet the person who makes your cells dance. you will be sure of it. because you are sure of yourself.”


105. “To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else's hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that "I'm only human" does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.”


106. “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” ― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick


107. 90. A message board. For something elegant, ask a graphic designer to create an image (or create one yourself) that says something like “We’re having a baby!” or “The adventure begins on [fill in the due date]!” or “Our family is growing.” You can size this pregnancy announcement to work with Facebook banners or on Instagram stories.


108. “In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”


109. “It is through exercise that the child grows; his constructive activity is a real work which flows materially from his outer environment. The child in his experiences exercises himself and moves; he thus learns to co-ordinate his movements and absorbs from the outer world the emotions that give concreteness to his intelligence. ”


110. “Just as a gardener cultivates his plot, keeping it free from weeds, and growing the flowers and fruits which he requires, so may a man tend the garden of his mind, weeding out all the wrong, useless, and impure thoughts, and cultivating toward perfection the flowers and fruits of right, useful, and pure thoughts.” - James Allen


111. “You’ve got to live right, too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidance, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together ... The real cycle you're working in is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to be "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.”


112. “The Influence Factor—Do they influence others? The Capacity Factor—Do they have the potential to grow and develop? The Attitude Factor—Do they desire to grow and develop themselves? The Chemistry Factor—Do we like each other? The Passion Factor—Are they self-motivated? The Character Factor—Are they grounded? The Values Factor—Are our values compatible? The Teamwork Factor—Do they work well with others? The Support Factor—Do they add value to me? The Creative Factor—Can they find possibilities in impossibilities? The Option Factor—Can their contribution give me options? The 10 Percent Factor—Are they in the top 10 percent of those on our team?”


113. “I always did something that I was a little not ready to do. I think that, that is how you grow. When there’s a moment of ‘Wow, I’m not so sure that I can do this, and you push through those moments, it’s then that you have a breakthrough. Sometimes that’s a sign that something really great is about to happen. You’re about to grow and learn a lot more about yourself.”


114. “None of us are perfect. You are still learning and growing. We all are. And this is a lesson for you: if you reengage on this task, if you do a stern self-assessment of how you lead and what you can do better, the outcome will be different. But it starts here. It starts at the board meeting when you go in, put your ego aside, and take ownership for the company’s failure here.”


115. “Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges. obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what? Get started now. With each step you take. you will grow stronger and stronger. more and more skilled. more and more self-confident and more and more successful.” — Mark Victor Hansen


116. “If you have great people around you, they will take you higher than your dream will. Leaders are never self-made. Those closest to you determine your level of success, so choosing the right companions as partners in pursuit of your vision is an important decision. My advice is to surround yourself with talented people who will challenge you, help you grow and inspire you to maximize your potential.” – John C. Maxwell


117. “Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.” – Mark Victor Hansen


118. “A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights. It's true what they say about women: Women are insatiable. We are greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we would ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands would begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, childcare, etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want, in bed and in the world.”


119. “unproductive retirees. Take care of yourself physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Get enough sleep. Stay healthy. Get some exercise. Have diversions. Read. Converse with interesting people. Expose yourself to new ideas. Spend time in solitary, renewing activities. Set new challenges for yourself. Do whatever is necessary to keep yourself vibrant, stimulated, growing, and alive as a human being.”


120. “A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified. which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body. she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness. she champions its rights. It's true what they say about women: Women are insatiable. We are greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too. if we believed we could get away with it. we would ask for more love. more sex. more money. more commitment to children. more food. more care. These sexual. emotional. and physical demands would begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly. parental leave. childcare. etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want. in bed and in the world.”


121. Do you know that within your power lies every step you ever dreamed of stepping and within your power lies every joy you ever dreamed of seeing? Within yourself lies everything you ever dreamed of being. Become everything that God wants you to be. It is within your reach. Dare to grow into your dreams and claim this as your motto: Let it be me.


122. “All I’m saying is that to liberate the potential of your mind, body and soul, you must first expand your imagination. You see, things are always created twice: first in the workshop of the mind and then, and only then, in reality. I call this process ‘blueprinting’ because anything you create in your outer world began as a simple blueprint in your inner world.” — Robin Sharma


123. Take the next steps: “Don’t wait until everything is right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, and less than perfect conditions. So what? Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger. You’ll be more and more skilled, more and more self-confident, and more and more successful.” – Po Bronson


124. “Because that’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms, and not wake up for a long, long time.” — Stephanie Perkins, Lola and the Boy Next Door


125. “Look at last week’s schedule. How much of your time did you devote to regular, disciplined activities? Did you do anything to grow and improve yourself professionally? Did you engage in activities promoting good health? Did you dedicate part of your income to savings or investments? If you’ve been putting off those things, telling yourself that you’ll do them later, you may need to work on your self-discipline.”


126. “By the time it came to the edge of the forest, the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, ‘There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.‘” – A. A. Milne


127. “So, leveraging Jesus’ teaching on love, Paul gives us the grown-up version of what love really is. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. (1 CORINTHIANS 13:4 – 8)”


128. “At one point, he pulled Greg and an older engineer named Tom Brumett into the big glass conference room and questioned their passion. Greg prided himself on never losing his cool, but this time he did. He leaned menacingly over the conference table. His huge, muscular frame towered over Sunny. “God damn it, we are working our asses off,” he growled. Sunny backed off and apologized.”


129. “Choose food, clothing, and shelter that accords with nature.Rely on your own body for transportation. Allow your work and your recreation to be one and the same. Do exercise that develops your whole being and not just your body. Listen to music that bridges the three spheres of your being. Choose leaders for their virtue rather than their wealth or power. Serve others and cultivate yourself simultaneously. Understand that true growth comes from meeting and solving problems of life in a way that is harmonizing to yourself and to others. If you can follow these simple old ways, you will be continually renewed.”


130. “In fact, for those of us who follow Jesus, we choose, of our own free will, to place ourselves under external authority-that of God himself, as mediated through Scripture, and, to a degree, our church. We do this because we believe authority is not inherently oppressive but, similar to parenting for children, a training ground for us to learn how to master our flesh and grow into people of love. Through trusted sources of authority, we get access to reality. And when authority is used well, with wisdom and compassion, we grow and mature into the kind of people who live in congruence with reality and, as a result, have the capacity to handle even more freedom.” P. 140-141


131. Do you know that within your power lies every step you ever dreamed of stepping and within your power lies every joy you ever dreamed of seeing? Within yourself lies everything you ever dreamed of being. Become everything that God wants you to be. It is within your reach. Dare to grow into your dreams and claim this as your motto: Let it be me. – Mary Kay Ash


132. “Each smallest act of kindness, reverberates across great distances and spans of time –affecting lives unknown to the one who’s generous spirit, was the source of this good echo. Because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage, years later, and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each expression of hatred, each act of evil.” ― Dean Koontz


133. “Our parents deserve our honor and respect for giving us life itself. Beyond this, they almost always made countless sacrifices as they cared for and nurtured us through our infancy and childhood, provided us with the necessities of life, and nursed us through physical illnesses and the emotional stresses of growing up.”


134. “Through constant familiarity, we can definitely establish new behavior patterns, using our tendency to form habits to our advantage. If we make a steady effort, I think we can overcome any form of negative conditioning and make positive changes in our lives. But we need to remember that genuine change doesn’t happen overnight.” – Dalai Lama


135. “When you need to be loved, you take love wherever you can find it. When you are desperate to be loved, feel love, know love, you seek out what you think love should look like. When you find love, or what you think love is, you will lie, kill, and steal to keep it. But learning about real love comes from within. It cannot be given. It cannot be taken away. It grows from your ability to re-create within yourself, the essence of loving experiences you have had in your life.”


136. “A couple that can argue well can also live together well. This does not mean that arguing is valued in and of itself. However, conflict is inevitable when two different people try to share their lives at many different levels. It is very important that neither is scared to speak up. It is vital that each can honestly say how they feel and what they think. Each must know that they are respected, even if disagreed with. Only in this way, can a genuine, open, and deep bond be grown between the two.”


137. ‘You can see how the belief that cherished qualities can be developed creates a passion for learning. Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives’.


138. “Stop blaming me, thinking I'm the problem. If you think I'm the problem, then you have to change me. If you realize that you're the problem, then you can change yourself, learn something and grow wiser. Most people want everyone else in the world to change themselves. Let me tell you, it's easier to change yourself than everyone else.”


139. “How would your life be different if...You were conscious about the food you ate, the people you surround yourself with, and the media you watch, listen to, or read? Let today be the day...You pay attention to what you feed your mind, your body, and your life. Create a nourishing environment conducive to your growth and well-being today.”


140. Don't wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what? Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident, and more and more successful. ­- Mark Victor Hansen


141. “Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles, and less than perfect conditions. So what? Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident, and more and more successful.” –Mark Victor Hansen


142. On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that 'all men are created equal' a self evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim 'a self evident lie.' — Abraham Lincoln


143. “I had to grow to love my body. I did not have a good self-image at first. Finally it occurred to me. I’m either going to love me or hate me. And I chose to love myself. Then everything kind of sprung from there. Things that I thought weren’t attractive became sexy. Confidence makes you sexy.” –Queen Latifah


144. “No matter what the psychologists say, complaining doesn’t make us feel better. Maybe temporarily, but in the long run complaining creates a cycle of negativity that feeds itself and grows. Think about it. For years psychologists had their patients hit punching bags to relieve anger only to find out recently that this practice creates more violence. It works the same with complaining. When we complain, we feed the negativity.”


145. “Human relationships, like life itself, can never remain static. They grow or they diminish. But, in either case, they change. Our emotional interests, our intellectual pursuits, our personal preoccupations, all change. So do those of our friends. So the relationship that binds us together must change too; it must be flexible enough to meet the alterations of person and circumstance”


146. “I suggest to you that every situation, every moment, provides the opportunity for self-growth and development of your character. Reality keeps bringing us circumstances—sometimes I picture them as waves breaking on the shore—and we have the chance to keep merging with that reality to fit ourselves to it, to dive into those waves. ​— ​DAVID K. REYNOLDS, AUTHOR OF CONSTRUCTIVE LIVING.”


147. “Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles, and less-than-perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident, and more and more successful.” – Mark Victor Hansen


148. “Sometimes, when you're deep in the countryside, you meet three girls, walking along the hill tracks in the dusk, spinning. They each have a spindle, and on to these they are spinning their wool, milk-white, like the moonlight. In fact, it is the moonlight, the moon itself, which is why they don't carry a distaff. They're not Fates, or anything terrible; they don't affect the lives of men; all they have to do is to see that the world gets its hours of darkness, and they do this by spinning the moon down out of the sky. Night after night, you can see the moon getting less and less, the ball of light waning, while it grown on the spindles of the maidens. Then, at length, the moon is gone, and the world has darkness, and rest.....


149. “At the very heart of our Circle of Influence is our ability to make and keep commitments and promises. The commitments we make to ourselves and to others, and our integrity to those commitments, is the essence and clearest manifestation of our proactivity. It is also the essence of our growth. Through our human endowments of self-awareness and conscience, we become conscious of areas of weakness, areas for improvement, areas of talent that could be developed, areas that need to be changed or eliminated from our lives. Then, as we recognize and use our imagination and independent will to act on that awareness—making promises, setting goals, and being true to them—we build the strength of character, the being, that makes possible every other positive thing in our lives. It is here that we find two ways to put ourselves in control of our lives immediately. We can make a promise—and keep it. Or we can set a goal—and work to achieve it. As we make and keep commitments, even small commitments, we begin to establish an inner integrity that gives us the awareness of self-control and the courage and strength to accept more of the responsibility for our own lives. By making and keeping promises to ourselves and others, little by little, our honor becomes greater than our moods.”


150. “The goal of this book is to help you reach any dream against all odds. Whether you want to transform a relationship, scale your team, start or grow your business, or be more productive in your personal life, my goal is to help you identify your habits that don’t work and replace them with empowering ones.”


151. “We know very little about self-development. But we do know one thing: People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment. If they demand little of themselves, they will remain stunted. If they demand a good deal of themselves, they will grow to giant stature--without any more effort than is expended by the non-achievers.”


152. “General Douglas MacArthur said, “Youth is not entirely a time of life; it is a state of mind. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals.… You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.”


153. “I think everyone, at some time in his life, has this happen to him, comes face to face with the bitter realization that he has failed in something that means a tremendous amount and probably in a relation that is close to him. Life teaches you that you cannot attain real maturity until you are ready to accept this harsh knowledge, this limitation in yourself, and make the difficult adjustment. Either you must learn to allow someone else to meet the need, without bitterness or envy, and accept it; or somehow you must make yourself learn to meet it. If you refuse to accept the limitation in yourself, you will be unable to grow beyond this point.”


154. “We have not sufficiently developed in our people the habit of analyzing a situation, of analyzing people’s words, of coming to their own decisions. I think it would be of great value if in our universities we gave the techniques of analyzing a subject from every point of view. It would be sound preparation for coping with world questions, which we must eventually solve. We cannot blindly leave them to government. We are the government. We have to take a new look at ourselves, at what our kind of government requires of us, at what our community needs from us; and then prepare to take a stand. In the long run there is no more liberating, no more exhilarating experience than to determine one’s position, state it bravely, and then act boldly. Action brings with it its own courage, its own energy, a growth of self-confidence that can be acquired in no other way”


155. “... the environment is fundamental; it must facilitate the expansion of the being in process of development by a reduction of obstacles to a minimum, and must allow free scope for a child's energies, by offering the necessary means for the activities to which they give rise. Now the adult himself is part of the child's environment; the adult must adjust himself to the child's needs if he is not to be a hindrance to him and if he is not to substitute himself for the child in the activities essential to growth and development. ”


156. “I cannot pinpoint a moment when I became politicized, when I knew that I would spend my life in the liberation struggle. To be an African in South Africa means that one is politicized from the moment of one's birth, whether one acknowledges it or not...His life is circumscribed by racist laws and regulations that cripple his growth, dim his potential, and stunt his life...I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, From henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.”


157. “Many financial analysts will find Emerson and Emery more interesting and appealing stocks than the other two—primarily, perhaps, because of their better “market action,” and secondarily because of their faster recent growth in earnings. Under our principles of conservative investment the first is not a valid reason for selection—that is something for the speculators to play around with. The second has validity, but within limits. Can the past growth and the presumably good prospects of Emery Air Freight justify a price more than 60 times its recent earnings?1 Our answer would be: Maybe for someone who has made an in-depth study of the possibilities of this company and come up with exceptionally firm and optimistic conclusions. But not for the careful investor who wants to be reasonably sure in advance that he is not committing the typical Wall Street error of overenthusiasm for good performance in earnings and in the stock market.* The same cautionary statements seem called for in the case of Emerson Electric, with a special reference to the market’s current valuation of over a billion dollars for the intangible, or earning-power, factor here. We should add that the “electronics industry,” once a fair-haired child of the stock market, has in general fallen on disastrous days. Emerson is an outstanding exception, but it will have to continue to be such an exception for a great many years in the future before the 1970 closing price will have been fully justified by its subsequent performance. By contrast, both ELTRA at 27 and Emhart at 33 have the earmarks of companies with sufficient value behind their price to constitute reasonably protected investments. Here the investor can, if he wishes, consider himself basically a part owner of these businesses, at a cost corresponding to what the”


158. “I had to grow to love my body. I did not have a good self image at first. Finally it occurred to me, I’m either going to love me or hate me. And I chose to love myself. Then everything kind of sprung from there. Things that I thought weren’t attractive became sexy. Confidence makes you sexy.” – Queen Latifah


159. To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else’s hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that “I’m only human” does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.


160. “Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '.


161. “A leader must be close with subordinates but not too close. The best leaders understand the motivations of their team members and know their people—their lives and their families. But a leader must never grow so close to subordinates that one member of the team becomes more important than another, or more important than the mission itself. Leaders must never get so close that the team forgets who is in charge.”


162. “One might say that the ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all. Without it, improvement is impossible. And certainly ego makes it difficult every step of the way. It is certainly more pleasurable to focus on our talents and strengths, but where does that get us? Arrogance and self-absorption inhibit growth. So does fantasy and “vision.”


163. “The “non-profit” institution neither supplies goods or services nor controls. Its “product” is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their “product” is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.”


164. “A loving relationship is one in which the loved one is free to be himself — to laugh with me, but never at me; to cry with me, but never because of me; to love life, to love himself, to love being loved. Such a relationship is based upon freedom and can never grow in a jealous heart.” — Leo F. Buscaglia


165. “Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.”


166. “Because that’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time.” — Stephanie Perkins


167. “Living life to the fullest takes a lot of dedication and hard work, especially when the going gets tough. However, If we have the courage to pay close attention to the wisdom that can be found within Yoga, we can conclude that Yoga is both a challenge and a triumph opportunities from which we can grow, much similar to living life. This ancient form of exercise goes deeper into the connection between mind, body, and spirit. It lies in the desire to excel oneself. Through self-love.”


168. “Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what? Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident, and more and more successful.” – Mark Victor Hansen


169. “A parent does not do everything for their kid. A parent that does everything for their kid produces a kid with no self-confidence. If our parents fixed everything for us and did not allow us to do anything on our own, or intervened every single time, we would all grow up to be completely dependent. The reason we grow up to be healthy adults is because our parents played this game of giving us responsibility, disciplining us when necessary, letting us try, letting us fail.”


170. “Now the little child who manifests perseverance in his work as the first constructive act of his psychical life, and upon this act builds up internal order, equilibrium, and the growth of personality, demonstrates, almost as in a splendid revelation, the true manner in which man renders himself valuable to the community. ”


171. “If you try anything, if you try to lose weight, or to improve yourself, or to love, or to make the world a better place, you have already achieved something wonderful, before you even begin. Forget failure. If things don't work out the way you want, hold your head up high and be proud. And try again. And again. And again!”


172. “If our goal is perfection rather than growth, it is unlikely that we are willing to go back, because it requires a level of self-empathy—the ability to look at our own actions with understanding and compassion; to understand our experiences in the context in which they happened and to do all this without judgment. I call this ability to reflect on our own actions with empathy “grounding.”


173. “Dedicating some time to meditation is a meaningful expression of caring for yourself that can help you move through the mire of feeling unworthy of recovery. As your mind grows quieter and more spacious, you can begin to see self-defeating thought patterns for what they are, and open up to other, more positive options.”— Sharon Salzberg


174. A message board. For something elegant, ask a graphic designer to create an image (or create one yourself) that says something like “We’re having a baby!” or “The adventure begins on [fill in the due date]!” or “Our family is growing.” You can size this pregnancy announcement to work with Facebook banners or on Instagram stories.


175. “But when the conditions are more subtle, things like office politics, opportunism, occasional rounds of layoffs and a general lack of trust among colleagues, we adapt. Like being at base camp on Everest, we believe that we are fine and can cope. However, the fact remains that the human animal is not built for these conditions. Even though we may think we’re comfortable, the effects of the environment still take their toll. Just because we become accustomed, just because it becomes normal, doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. On Everest, even after we’ve adapted, if we spend too long on the mountain, our internal organs start to break down. In an unhealthy culture, it’s the same. Even though we can get used to living with stress and low, regular levels of cortisol in our bodies, that doesn’t mean we should. A constant flow of cortisol isn’t just bad for organizations. It can also do serious damage to our health. Like the other selfish chemicals, cortisol can help us survive, but it isn’t supposed to be in our system all the time. It wreaks havoc with our glucose metabolism. It also increases blood pressure and inflammatory responses and impairs cognitive ability. (It’s harder to concentrate on things outside the organization if we are stressed about what’s going on inside.) Cortisol increases aggression, suppresses our sex drive and generally leaves us feeling stressed out. And here’s the killer—literally. Cortisol prepares our bodies to react suddenly—to fight or run as circumstances demand. Because this takes a lot of energy, when we feel threatened, our bodies turn off nonessential functions, such as digestion and growth. Once the stress has passed, these systems are turned on again. Unfortunately, the immune system is one of the functions that the body deems nonessential, so it shuts down during cortisol bursts. In other words, if we work in environments in which trust is low, relationships are weak or transactional and stress and anxiety are normal, we become much more vulnerable to illness.”


176. “To offer growth as a cause, growth for its own sake, is like eating just to get fat. It pushes executives to consider strategies that demonstrate growth with little to no consideration of any sense of purpose for that growth. Just like it would affect a human being, it should come as no surprise that the organizations that eat to get fat will eventually suffer from health problems. Growth as a cause often results in an unhealthy culture, one in which short-termism and selfishness reign supreme, while trust and cooperation suffer. Growth is a result, not a Cause. It’s an output, not a reason for being.”


177. “To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else’s hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that ‘I’m only human’ does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.”


178. “Another father, K.T. Dutschmann, a telephone engineer, a student of this course, couldn’t get his three-year old daughter to eat breakfast food. The usual scolding, pleading, coaxing methods had all ended in futility. So the parents asked themselves: “How can we make her want to do it?” The little girl loved to imitate her mother, to feel big and grown up; so one morning they put her on a chair and let her make the breakfast food. At just the psychological moment, Father drifted into the kitchen while she was stirring the cereal and she said: “Oh, look, Daddy, I am making the cereal this morning.” She ate two helpings of the cereal without any coaxing, because she was interested in it. She had achieved a feeling of importance; she had found in making the cereal an avenue of self-expression.”


179. “Our parents deserve our honour and respect for giving us life itself. Beyond this, they almost always made countless sacrifices as they cared for and nurtured us through our infancy and childhood, provided us with the necessities of life, and nursed us through physical illnesses and the emotional stresses of growing up.” – Ezra Taft Benson


180. Each time you make a good decision or do something nice or take care of yourself; each time you show up to work and work hard and do your best at everything you can do, you’re planting seeds for a life that you can only hope will grow beyond your wildest dreams. Take care of the little things—even the little things that you hate—and treat them as promises to your own future. Soon you’ll see that fortune favors the bold who get sh*t done.


181. “Having the strength to pull yourself away from the toxicity and surrounding yourself with all the nourishing things you need to grow is a huge accomplishment. Although not everybody has supporting family and friends in this new world of ours, that doesn’t mean you should give up; there is a whole world full of great people willing to help you succeed. You just have to learn how to surround yourself with them and appreciate them, not use them for your own selfishness. And then, my friend, you have learned a life lesson.” – Bonnie Zackson Koury


182. “People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you’re fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly.”


183. “Because that’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time.” —Stephanie Perkins, author


184. “Ol' man Simon, planted a diamond. Grew hisself a garden the likes of none. Sprouts all growin' comin' up glowin' Fruit of jewels all shinin' in the sun. Colors of the rainbow. See the sun and the rain grow sapphires and rubies on ivory vines, Grapes of jade, just ripenin' in the shade, just ready for the squeezin' into green jade wine. Pure gold corn there, Blowin' in the warm air. Ol' crow nibblin' on the amnythyst seeds. In between the diamonds, Ol' man Simon crawls about pullin' out platinum weeds. Pink pearl berries, all you can carry, put 'em in a bushel and haul 'em into town. Up in the tree there's opal nuts and gold pears- Hurry quick, grab a stick and shake some down. Take a silver tater, emerald tomater, fresh plump coral melons. Hangin' in reach. Ol' man Simon, diggin' in his diamonds, stops and rests and dreams about one... real... peach.”


185. “I had to grow to love my body. I did not have a good self-image at first. Finally it occurred to me, I’m either going to love me or hate me. And I chose to love myself. Then everything kind of sprung from there. Things that I thought weren’t attractive became sexy. Confidence makes you sexy.” ~Queen Latifah


186. “Holmes, too, continued to embrace an exalted image of herself. In her acceptance speech at Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year Awards at Carnegie Hall, she held herself up as a role model for young women. “Do everything you can to be the best in science and math and engineering,” she urged them. “It’s that that our little girls will see when they start to think about who do they want to be when they grow up.”


187. “I had to grow to love my body. I did not have a good self-image at first. Finally it occurred to me. I’m either going to love me or hate me. And I chose to love myself. Then everything kind of sprung from there. Things that I thought weren’t attractive became sexy. Confidence makes you sexy.” – Queen Latifah


188. It seems to me that sometimes the worst parents make the best grandparents. I'm not sure why. Maybe because there is enough of a generational separation that they don't see their grandchildren as an extension of themselves, so their relationship isn't tainted by any self-loathing. And of course, just growing older seems to soften and relax people. — Sarah Silverman


189. “Friendship plants itself as a small unobtrusive seed; over time, it grows thick roots that wrap around your heart. When a love affair ends, the tree is torn out quickly, the operation painful but clean. Friendship withers quietly, there is always hope of revival. Only after time has passed do you recognize that it is dead, and you are left, for years afterward, pulling dry brown fibers from your chest.”


190. “Money is the fuel to advance a Cause, it is not a Cause itself. The reason to grow is so that we have more fuel to advance the Cause. Just as we don’t buy a car simply so we can buy more gas, so too must companies offer more value than their ability to make money. A company, like a car, is more valuable to all constituents when it takes us somewhere to which we would otherwise be unable to go. That place we envision going to is the Just Cause.”


191. Your core values make you an individual, it’s your standards that create your personable nature and it’s the confidence to grow with others, learn to trust that your aura will send some magic in this world. The right people will always love you for exactly who you are. The only justification is really to yourself. – Jasmina Siderovski


192. “It is tremendously important that we should understand the spontaneous way in which the child develops himself. We are so anxious to help, to us it seems the burden of growth and development is so great that we must do all we can to make the pathway easy. And so our love may easily overreach itself and by providing too many urges, too many cautions and corrections. ”


193. “Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles, and less-than-perfect conditions. So what? Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident, and more and more successful.”


194. “Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.”


195. “If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator. He will not be striving for it as a goal in itself. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day.” ~W. Beran Wolfe

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