Theme
Growth
Getting better, learning by doing, becoming who you could be.
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Verified quotes about growth
Each is traced to a real source and correctly credited. ✓ Free to use = public domain, cleared for commercial reuse. Open one for a paste-ready credit line and its reuse status.
“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing”
“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery”
“A teacher, a really good sensei, is never a giver of 'truth'; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that the student must discover for himself”
“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative”
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own”
“Be patient and tough; some day this pain will be useful to you”
“Be so good they can't ignore you”
“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise”
“By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart”
“Every artist was first an amateur”
“Every habit and faculty is maintained and increased by the corresponding actions: the habit of walking by walking, the habit of running by running. If you would be a good reader, read; if a writer, write”
“Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again”
“Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon them”
“From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”
“Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people”
“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time”
“I am always doing what I can't do yet in order to learn how to do it”
“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship”
“I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again”
“I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was man”
“I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy”
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress”
“If you live long enough, you'll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you'll be a better person”
“Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind”
“Isn't it a pleasure to study and practice what you have learned?”
“It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man”
“It's life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting process”
“Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day”
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving”
“Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer”
“Never say never, because limits, like fears, are often just an illusion”
“No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen”
“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path”
“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves”
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful”
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go”
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls”
“Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process”
“Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?”
“Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle”
“Strive manfully; custom is overcome by custom”
“Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts”
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain”
“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life”
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed”
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go”
“The past is but the beginning of a beginning”
“The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change”
“There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing”
“These books ain't window dressing. I think Machiavelli's the most sophisticated writer outside of Shakespeare”
“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home”
“To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often”
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit”
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths”
“We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery”
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started”
“What a man can be, he must be”
“What does not kill me makes me stronger”
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves”
“When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them”
“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes”
“Wisdom is the daughter of experience”
“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face”
“You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you”
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”
“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding”
“All things are difficult before they are easy”
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom”
“Champions keep playing until they get it right”
“Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today”
“Don't limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do”
“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today”
“Every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit”
“Everything negative — pressure, challenges — is all an opportunity for me to rise”
“I restore myself when I'm alone. A career is born in public — talent in privacy”
“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty”
“Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest”
“The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself — the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us — that's where it's at”
“The mamba mentality is a constant quest to try to be better today than you were yesterday”
“The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads — in the end — to the best within us”
“The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short”
“The way to recover the meaning of life and the worthwhileness of life is to recover the power of experience, to have impulse voices from within, and to be able to hear these impulse voices from within”
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through”
“What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself”
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”
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Don’t get caught out
Commonly shared about growth — but misattributed
Popular growth lines that get pinned on the wrong name. If you use one, credit it correctly.
“A Ship in Harbor Is Safe, But that Is Not What Ships Are Built For”
ReallyJohn A. Shedd · not Albert Einstein
“Education Is What Remains After You Have Forgotten Everything You Learned In School”
ReallyUnknown — anonymous origin · not Albert Einstein
“Continuous Effort — Not Strength or Intelligence — Is the Key to Unlocking and Using Our Potential”
ReallyLiane Cordes · not Winston Churchill
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education”
ReallyGrant Allen · not Mark Twain
“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better”
ReallyMaya Angelou
“Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you find that you have accomplished a purpose”
ReallyAnne Sullivan · not Helen Keller
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world”
ReallyUnknown advertising copywriter · not John D. Rockefeller
“Good management consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people”
ReallyNo verified author · not John D. Rockefeller
“Don't cut your flowers and water your weeds”
ReallyPeter Lynch · not Warren Buffett
“There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance next time”
ReallyUnknown — the same sentence circulates as Og Mandino · not Malcolm X
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity”
ReallyEllen Parr · not Dorothy Parker
“The most important thing in life is to stop saying 'I wish' and start saying 'I will'”
ReallyUnknown · not Charles Dickens
“Be at War with Your Vices, at Peace with Your Neighbours, and Let Every New Year Find You a Better Person”
ReallyBenjamin Franklin · not Publilius Syrus
“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing”
ReallyJohn Butler Yeats · not W. B. Yeats
“If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life”
ReallyAbraham Maslow · but not in these words
“If you walk far enough you'll meet yourself”
ReallyAnonymous · not Joseph Campbell
“In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety”
ReallyAbraham Maslow · but not in these words
“Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure”
ReallySogyal Rinpoche · not Rainer Maria Rilke