Mistakes are really not that big of a deal. In fact, as most of us acknowledge, we need to make mistakes in order to learn and to grow.
—Richard Carlson in The Big Book of Small Stuff
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.
—Charles Brower
We grow small trying to be great.
—David Hockney
Love dies only when growth stops.
—Pearl S. Buck
Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.
—Dorothy Parker
People should not judge failed love affairs as failed experiences but as part of the growth process. Something does not have to end well for it to have been one of the most valuable experiences of a lifetime.
—Ethel Person
The trouble with a kitten is that eventually it becomes a cat.
—Ogden Nash
From the rise, he looks out over his place. This is it. This is all there is in the world—it contains everything there is to know or possess, yet everywhere people are knocking their brains out trying to find something different, something better. His kids all scattered, looking for it. Everyone always wants a way out of something like this, but what he has here is the main thing there is—just the way things grow and die, the way the sun comes up and goes down every day. These are the facts of life. They are so simple, they are almost impossible to grasp.
—Bobbie Ann Mason
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here not merely in a personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
—James Baldwin
Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.
—Douglas William Jerrold
Growth is the only evidence of life.
—John Henry Newman
Growing up is a trap. When they tell you to shut up, they mean stop talking. When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat.
—Tom Robbins
It gives one a feeling of confidence to see nature still busy with experiments, still dynamic, and not through nor satisfied because a Devonian fish managed to end as a two-legged character with a straw hat. There are other things brewing and growing in the oceanic vat. It pays to know this. It pays to know that there is just as much future as there is past. The only thing that doesn't pay is to be sure of man's own part in it. There are things down there still coming ashore.
—Loren Eiseley
Love grows more tremendously full, swift, poignant, as the years multiply.
—Zane Grey
One does not fall in love; one grows into love, and love grows in him.
—Karl A. Menninger