Growth Quotes

“Best men oft are moulded out of faults.”

“A pal is one that is aware you while you are, understands where you have already been, accepts whatever you are becoming, and continue to, carefully means that you can develop.”

“Small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace.”

“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”

“The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.”

“You must let go of a thing for a new one to come to you.”

“A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.”

“A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock.”

“When a man becomes cultivated, he develops a new respect for who he is. This causes him to be ashamed of his past identification of himself and others according to things, i.e. property.”

“The heavens forbidBut that our loves and comforts should increaseEven as our days do grow!”

“This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath, May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet”

“One can never truly savor success until first tasting adversity.”

“That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.”

“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

“Strikes deeper, grows with more pernicious root.”

“Hither rolls the storm of heat;I feel its finer billows beatLike a sea which me infolds;Heat with viewless fingers moulds,Swells, and mellows, and matures,Paints, and flavors, and allures,Bird and brier inly warms,Still enriches and transforms,Gives the reed and lily length,Adds to oak and oxen strength,Transforming what it doth infold,Life out of death, new out of old.”

“The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.”

“But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends.”

“The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

“Not in his goals but in his transitions, man is great.”

“We all need someone who can help us do what we already can.”

“Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. What possesses interest for us is thenatural of each, his constitutional excellence. This is forever a surprise, engaging and lovely; we cannot be satiated with knowing it, and about it; and it is this which the conversation with Nature cherishes and guards.”

“Men succeed when they realize that their failures are the preparation for their victories.”

“Our strength grows out of our weakness.”

“We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.”