Quotes about Growth

A man must practice good works for a long time, with great effort and determination, and "at last God comes, dwells within him and he in the Lord, and the Lord Himself sows His own commandments within him, filling him with spiritual fruit." - St. Marcarius the Great - Homily 19

"Sometimes God allows a relative or fellow worker to cause us problems in order to exercise our patience and humbleness; however, instead of being grateful for the chance God gives us, we react and refused to be cured.  It is like refusing to pay the doctor who is giving us a shot when we are ill."

Father Paisios Eznepides (+1994)

Examine yourself to see whether you have within you a strong sense of your own self importance, or negatively, whether you have failed to realize that you are nothing.  This feeling of self-importance is deeply hidden, but it controls the whole of our life.  Its first demand is that everything should be as we wish it, and as soon as this is not so we complain to God and are annoyed with people.

Saint Theophan the Recluse

"He who follows properly the spiritual pathway begins to see in himself more and more sins, until finally he sees himself completely immersed in sin.  Through his spiritual eyes he perceives his leprous soul.  He feels with his whole heart that he is dirt and filth, that he is unworthy even to call out the name of God.  Like the publican, unable to raise his eyes, he cries out with pain of heart: 'God have mercy on me the sinner.'  When a person maintains his soul in such a spiritual state for a long time, he finally emerges from it absolved, like the publican."

Abbot Nikon

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

I've never met anyone with a perfect upbringing. It seems to me that life on planet Earth just doesn't work that way. The basic challenges of getting our needs met and managing boundaries are inherent in growing up human.

"It is not the self -critical who reveals his humility ( for does not everyone have some how to put up with himself? ).  Rather, it is the man who continues to love the person who has criticized him."

Saint John Climacus

Change is inevitable, growth is intentional.

They were nice enough people and all, but there wasn't much love in them.  Because they were too busy being afraid. Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn't grow very well in a place where it was always dark.

Growth requires change,
and with growth there is pain,
but it is short lived compared
to living every day
with the pain of ignorance.

Marianne Goldweber

‘THE CHILD is father to the man.’   
How can he be? The words are wild.   
Suck any sense from that who can:   
‘The child is father to the man.’   
No; what the poet did write ran,
‘The man is father to the child.’   
‘The child is father to the man!’   
How can he be? The words are wild.

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

We are energetic beings where spirit meets matter, all connected through a timeless energetic matrix. While the quest for health and well being may seem limited to a personal experience, it is through actively honoring ourself and others with integrity and truth, celebrating life with appreciation and gratitude, engaging in pursuits that allow us to achieve our highest potential and expand our consciousness, that we each support and facilitate the transformation and wellbeing of others and the world we live.  This is our responsibility as evolving energetic beings and it is time that we all embrace this way of Being.

Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by greater and greater beings.

"Wherever there is greatness,  great government or power,
even great feeling or compassion,
Error also is great.We progress and mature by fault"

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

"In order for there to be growth, there must be change."

"In order for there to be growth, there must be change."

"How are you today?"

"Better than yesterday."

"That's a good way to be; not better than anyone else, just better than you were."

Growth is positive and necessary, even when it is personally painful.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

It is man's intrinsic and irreducible self-responsibility to humanize himself, to exercise his entire range of rational and moral resources to raise his mode of being and seeing and acting above not just that of animals, but also above that of the majority of subhuman (never to be self-realized) humans who will never draw themselves into a self-punishing position of focal self-diagnosis and self-accountability.

God will take you through hell just to get you to heaven

To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.

The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a growing depth, beauty, and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing; it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of divine accident, and the most wonderful of all things in life.

There's a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever been born on the earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain and just try to get comfortable. You can see this even in insects and animals and birds. All of us are the same.

A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet.  To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms, to lead a more passionate, full, and delightful life than that, we must realize that we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is, how we tick and how our world ticks, how the whole thing just is.

Spiritual growth requires the acknowledgement of one`s need to grow.

Discontent is the seed of growth.

We don't grow old.  When we cease to grow, we become old.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The aristic thrust and conception of "contra natura" lie in our power finitely to extend our self-mastery, to GROW in will and spirit; but as Nietzsche repeatedly teaches in ZARATHUSTRA, such ends must be WILLABLE, achievable. There is nothing to be learned from the human-all-too-human impulse for self-deification or wholesale transcendence over the vicissitudes of life -- even though this aims at something contra natura, it is not truly concretely WILLABLE, it is just a fantasy of our imagination. We cannot BECOME a God. But we can learn to hold our deepest passions in check for the sake of a higher morality, if indeed we are aristoi. Willing and valuing must become an art, must be made consonant or coherent with the fabric of our natures. Mere megalomaniacal extravagance does not truly increase our charge of concentrated power; on the contrary it fires up our ambition with inflationary abstractions that give no traction or purchase to our actual wills. That way lies radical frustration and a metaphysics of depression: an inevitable life-pattern of self-delusion, as we suffer over and over from the necessity that "it would not be better if men got what they wanted," and yet will not permit ourselves ever to see or to learn anything from this self-deception and self-betrayal.