personal growth quotes

Nobody can hurt me without my permission.

Whatever you are, be a good one.

Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.

I don’t know what drives me to succeed.

Do not be in a hurry to succeed. What would you have to live for afterwards? Better make the horizon your goal; it will always be ahead of you.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

I don’t want to make money, I just want to be wonderful.

It is only to the individual that a soul is given.

If I feel good about my parenting, I have no interest in judging other people’s choices. If I feel good about my body, I don’t go around making fun of other people’s weight or appearance. We’re hard on each other because we’re using each other as a launching pad out of our own perceived deficiency.

In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride.

It’s normal for human beings to identify with their own separate self. The problem is that we get caught in that notion of ourself as a separate individual and caught in that individual self’s agenda.

What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.

In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that’s not easy.

You must live for another if you wish to live for yourself.

I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

Observe all men, thyself most.

I don’t think I’m such an amazing person who needs to be written about.

The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.

It is always your next move.

One of the things I did when I discovered this huge importance of being vulnerable is very happily moved away from the shame research, because that’s such a downer, and people hate that topic. It’s not that vulnerability is the upside, but it’s better than shame, I guess.

It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you get off on sometimes. What matters most is getting off. You cannot make progress without making decisions.

Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.

You cannot see the changes that you’re dreaming about, because they’re internal.

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

I think I’ve got wiser.

What’s really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.

Things do not always happen the way I would like them to happen, and I had better get used to that.

I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.

I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.

There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

I can express myself.

Sometimes I feel my whole life has been one big rejection.

Follow your honest convictions and be strong.

To meditate means to go home to yourself. Then you know how to take care of the things that are happening inside you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.

My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.

We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice.

A career is born in public – talent in privacy.

I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.

All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?

If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.

One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.

For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and everyone who humbles himself will be exalted.

I would rather make my name than inherit it.

Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our means – either may do – the result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier.

The difficulties you meet will resolve themselves as you advance. Proceed, and light will dawn, and shine with increasing clearness on your path.

Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.

I was raised in a family where vulnerability was barely tolerated: no training wheels on our bicycles, no goggles in the pool, just get it done. And so I grew up not only with discomfort about my own vulnerability, I didn’t care for it in other people either.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

I never expected to be anybody important.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.