Growth

“To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.” Every human being has both sets of forces within us. One set clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress backward, hanging on to the past, afraid to grow, afraid to take chances, afraid to jeopardize what he already has, afraid of independence, freedom and separateness. The other set of forces impels us forward toward wholeness of Self and uniqueness of Self, toward full functioning of all his capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the same time that he can accept his deepest, real, unconscious Self.

Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

You will have bad times, but they will always wake you up to the stuff you weren’t paying attention to.

It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours, and you’ll drift in that direction.

A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.

The more I train, the more I realize I have more speed in me.

Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.

Carefully watch your thoughts, for they become your words. Manage and watch your words, for they will become your actions. Consider and judge your actions, for they have become your habits. Acknowledge and watch your habits, for they shall become your values. Understand and embrace your values, for they become your destiny.

Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but-I hope-into a better shape.

Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.

No words can express how much the world owes to sorrow. Most of the Psalms were born in the wilderness. Most of the Epistles were written in a prison. The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through fire. The greatest poets have ‘learned in suffering what they were taught in song.’

If there is no struggle, there can be no progress.

When Africans become Christians, their African-ness is converted, completed and resolved, not replaced with...something else.

Discipline her heart without breaking her spirit.

The most important events make no stir on their first taking place, nor indeed in their effects directly. They seem hedged about by secrecy. It is concussion, or the rushing together of air to fill a vacuum, which makes a noise. The great events to which all things consent, and for which they have prepared the way, produce no explosion, for they are gradual, and create no vacuum which requires to be suddenly filled; as a birth takes place in silence, and is whispered about the neighborhood. Corn grows in the night.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

"It doesn’t happen all at once.", said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. Thats why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.

It is hard to make that boat go as fast as you want to. The enemy, of course, is resistance of the water, as you have to displace the amount of water equal to the weight of men and equipment, but that very water is what supports you and that very enemy is your friend. So is life: the very problems you must overcome also support you and make you stronger in overcoming them.

Harmony, balance, and rhythm. They’re the three things that stay with you your whole life. Without them civilization is out of whack. And that’s why an oarsman, when he goes out in life, he can fight it, he can handle life. That’s what he gets from rowing.

The challenges they had faced together had taught them humility—the need to subsume their individual egos for the sake of the boat as a whole—and humility was the common gateway through which they were able now to come together and begin to do what they had not been able to do before. •

The longer you delay, the more your sin gets strength and rooting. If you cannot bend a twig, how will you be able to bend it when it is a tree?

A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to see and do new things.

“That’s a good thing,” the assistant told me. “When you’re screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they’ve given up on you”.

That lesson stuck with me my whole life. When you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a bad place to be. You may not want to hear it, but your critics are often the ones telling you they still love you and care about you, and want to make you better. Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

U.S Airways Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger Pilot during the “Miracle on the Hudson River” In the final analysis, it is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings

A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner.

“They say the best men are born out of their faults and that they often improve later on, more than if they’d never done anything wrong,” she’d said gently.

Rolf Backman. My father. Because I hope I am unlike you in the smallest possible number of ways.

‘Nay, time does not tarry ever,’ he said; ‘but change and growth is not in all things and places alike. THE TWO TOWERS

‘He has grown, or something. He can be both kinder and more alarming, merrier and more solemn than before, I think.

For it is said that, though the fruit of the Tree comes seldom to ripeness, yet the life within may then lie sleeping through many long years, and none can foretell the time in which it will awake. Remember this. For if ever a fruit ripens, it should be planted, lest the line die out of the world.

Do you not yet understand? My time is over: it is no longer my task to set things to rights, nor to help folk to do so. And as for you, my dear friends, you will need no help. You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you.

spiritual hygiene is actually wholeness of spirit —that is, wholeness of what animates and characterizes us. Spiritual hygiene is the wholeness of resources,

motive, purpose, and character typical of someone who fits snugly into God’s broad design for shalom. A spiritually hygienic person is one who combines strengths and flexibilities, disciplines and freedoms, all working together from a renewable source of vitality. This is a person who flourishes like a fine sapling rooted into the bank of a dependable stream.

How peculiar, then, that sin multiplies right along with goodness. Faithful parents tend to reproduce themselves, but so do faithless ones. Generous acts congeal into character traits, but so do selfish ones. People who long for God want to satisfy their appetite and also to sharpen it, but the same is true of sex addicts.

Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.