Personal Growth Quotes

My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth inside out into the light.

A man only begins to be a man when he ceases to whine and revile, and commences to search for the hidden justice which regulates his life. And he adapts his mind to that regulating factor, he ceases to accuse others as the cause of his condition, and builds himself up in strong and noble thoughts; ceases to kick against circumstances, but begins to use them as aids to his more rapid progress, and as a means of the hidden powers and possibilities within himself.

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.

In my younger days, I was arrogant - jail helped me to get rid of it. I did nothing but make enemies because of my arrogance.

Try viewing everyone who comes into your life as a teacher.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.... The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Heroism is a matter of integrity--beco ming more and more at each step ourselves.

Find a great role model, perhaps someone who struggled and only really succeeded when older. Their biography and what they've done differently from you will help you. If such a person is willing to mentor you or at least allow you to work around them, great.

We would never move forward in the face of negative emotion. There are many people who would teach you otherwise. They say, you've got to face fear to get over it. And all they do is desensitize themselves to the point that they get themselves into situations where they have no idea what's going on, and the end of them comes rather abruptly... And then everyone calls them brave.

We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.

When we are foolish, we want to conquer the world. When we are wise, we want to conquer ourselves. That begins when we do what we should no matter how we feel about it.

I think we have to go through everything we go through in our life, and I believe my purpose in life was to teach self-reliance. So I had the experience of relying on myself very early in life in order to have that knowing, because otherwise I would've just read about it. I think of it now as a great advantage that I had. It certainly taught me to rely upon myself at a very young age. And that's what I've been teaching since I was a little boy.

To love yourself is a never-ending journey.

We can let our past [difficulties and failures] beat us or teach us [to be more knowledgeable, competent and realistic in the future]!

I think it's important that you know that I will never change. But I'll never stay the same either

In archery we have something like the way of the superior man. When the archer misses the center of the target, he turns round and seeks for the cause of his failure in himself.

When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life. Have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around that you call life was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.

A dollar put into a book and a book mastered might change the whole course of a boy's life. It might easily be the beginning of the development of leadership that would carry the boy far in service to his fellow men.

Getting organized in the normal routines of life and finishing little projects you've started is an important first step toward realizing larger goals. If you can't get a handle on the small things, how will you ever get it together to focus on the big things?

You take a weakness and start making it stronger.. You don't have to build your strengths - that you already possess... It is your weakness that needs the exercise

We can't slow up because of our love for democracy and our love for America. Someone should tell Faulkner that the vast majority of the people on this globe are colored.

The big challenge is to become all that you have the possibility of becoming. You cannot believe what it does to the human spirit to maximize your human potential and stretch yourself to the limit.

I learned very soon to get along by myself.

Unless we do more than simply learn the trade of our time, we are but apprentices, and not yet masters of the art of life.

The religion of Islam actually restores one's human feelings, human rights, human incentives, human, his talent.

A superior who works on his own development sets an almost irresistible example.

What do you plan to do in the land of the sleepers? You have been floating in a sea of solitude, and the sea has borne you up. At long last, are you ready for dry land? Are you ready to drag yourself ashore?

Discipline comes through self control. This means that you must control all negative qualities. Before you can control conditions, you must first control yourself. Self-mastery is the hardest job you will ever tackle. If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self.

The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.

Don't choose the better person, choose the person who makes a better you.

If you want to reach your potential and become the person you were created to be, you must do much more than just experience life and hope that you learn what you need along the way. You must go out of your way to seize growth opportunities as if your future depended on it. Why? Because it does. Growth doesn't just happen--not for me, not for you, not for anybody. You HAVE TO go after it.

Giving is like a muscle. To be strong, you have to exercise it, and to grow as a person, giving is the exercise. You can't really enjoy anything without sharing it.

Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

One of the things that made me long to be back in prison was that I had so little opportunity for reading, thinking and quiet reflection after my release. I intend, amongst other things, to give myself much more opportunity for such reading and reflection.

The final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

People say, "John, what's your personal growth?" And ask "How do you grow?" And I tell them. I thought, "Why do I keep telling them, why don't I just write a book on what I call personal growth?" And that's what this [Today Matters] book is.

I have learned that I really do have discipline, self-control, and patience. But they were given to me as a seed, and it's up to me to choose to develop them.

Discipline is training that corrects and perfects our mental faculties or molds our moral character. Discipline is control gained by enforced obedience. It is the deliberate cultivation of inner order.

My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.

Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses.

A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.

Life calls us forth to independence, and anyone who does not heed this call because of childish laziness or timidity is threatened with neurosis. And once this has broken out, it becomes an increasingly valid reason for running away from life.

Direct your eye inward, and you'll find / A thousand regions in your mind / Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be / Expert in home-cosmography

If you want to change your life, change the questions you ask yourself each day!

Habits are funny things. What's funny, or rather tragic, is that bad habits are so predictable and avoidable. Despite this, there are people by the millions who insist on acquiring habits that are bad, expensive, and create problems. The habit they weren't going to get, got them!

Always do what you are afraid to do.

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.

If you're blaming something or someone else for the way you are, then that person, those people, those circumstances or those energies, are going to have to change in order for you to get better; that's most likely never going to happen. It's also a way to manipulate other people.

Our past experiences may have made us the way we are, but we don't have to stay that way.

Do that which you fear to do, and the fear will die.

I think the hardest thing for a person is to know what those twelve things are that they need to work on that will bring the return of success to their life.

Confront your inadequacies and push your personal boundaries: It's the surest way to grow, improve and expand the scope of your influence.

Learning to live for others isn't something that just comes naturally to anybody. You have to train yourself to do it.

I've learned that forgiving is one of the greatest gifts that I can give myself.

It's the moments of our life that shape us.

To grow yourself, you must know yourself.

Break through the bonds of your past.