Personal Development Quotes

Life includes unforeseen incidents that prove critical to promote personal growth. Life rarely gives us what we want. We are lucky if life gives us what we need in order to fulfill the path that was in place at our birthing.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

When it comes to identity we are all constructs. Who we think we are is the result of our upbringing, memories, skill set, knowledge, experiences and personal belief system. Of all the onion layers that make us who we are, our belief system is what powers our core. It’s what creates the essence of a human being and makes it possible for each of us to exceed our limits, confound expectations and do the impossible.

~ David Amerland

A brand is a person.

~ Richie Norton

A brand is a person that has a voice, evokes emotion and spreads a message. Build a brand or a brand will build you. Create your personal brand. If you don't build your own brand, you will let someone else brand you with the wrong label.

~ Richie Norton

Build a brand or a brand will build you.

~ Richie Norton

A person begins childhood with a mind that is essentially a blank slate – a tabula rasa – before receiving outside impressions. Early childhood experiences and perceptions begin the formulation of a state of conscious awareness, the infantile steps in forming a personality, developing social and emotional behavior, and acquiring practical and book knowledge. Childhood plays a critical role in forming our final version of a self-concept.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Personal growth doesn’t occur without effort. The effort is one of recognizing your own power, and taking ownership and responsibility for your own development.

~ Farshad Asl

In essence, all of our words evoke, develop, and bring forth our reality. We always have the power to choose our words and our reality.

~ Julie Reisler

Confidence sometimes requires purposeful preparation and practice.

~ Sam Owen

Any good person who is motivated to attain awareness of the whole truth should follow the Universal Way to calm his mind and harmonize it with all aspects of life.

~ Lao Tzu

Humankind’s amazing grace is the ability to choose right from wrong, and assume personal responsibility for our conduct. With the judicious exercise of composure and appliance of self-discipline, we exceed our humble origins and blossom into a final rendering of whatever type of person we aspire to become.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A personality alters itself through a series of self-referential experiences. We are not the same as the day before. Much as a person can never set foot in exactly the same river on any given day, we are different each day. Yesterday made us, but the past cannot contain nor restrain us. We can never mentally scroll backward and be who we used to be. We must move forward in the stream of life until the day that our life force dries up and we return to dust.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing about the self to spur intellectual growth or attain a teardrop of emotional salvation is akin to a fish attempting to construct a net that will capture itself.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Optimism doesn't make you more persistent. Persistence makes you more optimistic.

~ Richie Norton

If you are not an asset for humanity then you are a liability for humanity.

~ Deepak Burfiwala

Personal development business is a business of lifetime.

~ Deepak Burfiwala

Each of us encounters many diverse experiences that make us grow and transform, but we seek to return to our roots, which is quietude.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The strongest principle of personal development is every person’s ability to make conscious decisions how to act and determine what purpose he or she attempts to fulfill. People with a fixed mindset believe that their basic personal qualities such as intelligence, talent, and other skills are traits that are predetermined or fixed and they ignore opportunities for personal development. A person’s growth mindset represents a belief that there are certain basic qualities that a person can cultivate through applied effort, if they exhibit a passion for learning, a resolute willingness to stretch their personality, and through fortitude make personal improvement despite experiencing initial hardships.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The choices we make in life determine human identities. A person might choose to avoid or confront their deepest night terrors. A person can elect to live carefully or rashly. A person can embrace ignorance or incessantly work to acquire knowledge of the larger world filled with people, nature, and ideas. A person can live a placid life or boldly seek out vivid encounters is a world filled with anarchy, chaos, hazards, and incomparable beauty and slender. A person can hold onto attachments and fear death or live their life as a mere witness and perceive their personal death as part of the collective story and the culmination of a life will lived. A person can employ their time in a material world to enhance personal pleasures or to develop their innate skills and strive towards attaining self-realization. A person may perceive their existence as pitiful drudgery, or live a courageously, making a statement with their wounds and scars that life is a thrilling mystery filled with longing, love, and holiness.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We each act as the creator of the self, and therefore, we strive to attain self-realization by understanding what we were in various stages of life including what we began as and what we transmuted into becoming.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We employ free will to design of our own being and therefore we must accept responsibility for our actions.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We are each a product of our biological endowments, culture, and personal history. Culture ideology and cultural events along with transmitted cultural practices influences each of us. We are each the product of our collective interchanges. Our county’s domestic and interlinked international conflicts fuse us together. We are each a molecule in the helix of human consciousness joined in a physical world. We form a coil of connective tissue soldered together by cultural links.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Question everything and start from yourself.

~ Iisakki Totuudentalo

Writing journal is for those people who find no interest in living a life of victimhood and limited personal freedom.

~ Deepak Burfiwala

Management works in the system,Leadership works on the system

~ Stephen R. Covey

Liberating a prejudiced mind from its preconceived notions and scripting a life of purposefulness requires constant postulation, observation, evaluation, and synthesizing.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We are each authors of a self-concocted depiction establishing our present day identity. Our persona is woven from a range of truths interweaved with inspired imagination and occasionally bounded by convenient falsehoods. Creating our personal story generates an identity myth that allows us to carry on.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A life of leisure never satisfies anyone who possesses a lively mind.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Your only job is creating a life that contains a story worth telling.

~ Carolyn Parkhurst

The only manner to blunt in a wholesome and righteous manner the emotional trauma of living under a death sentence is by making every day count, living passionately, and dedicating the journey stumbling through time to accomplishing a master life plan. We can assist each other find meaning in life and undertake a path that make every person’s life a worthy endeavor, but each person bears the personal responsibility for living their life, establishing who they are, and behaving in a manner that provides credence to their self-imposed ideology. If a person persists in shifting personal responsibility for their way of life onto someone else, they he or she fails to discover the meaning of his own existence.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Perception of a self is not simply about actuality. Human beings’ identities are self-generating and people constantly revise and recreate the story of their being. Coming-into-being, not being, is the highest expression of reality. We only attain the fullest knowledge of a living thing including ourselves when we know what it was, understand what it now is, and understand what it can become. We do not know the truth of a living thing’s existence until we discern its entire history from development to demise.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The ego with its protective defense mechanisms is the biggest impediment to attaining spiritual growth.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A person seeks to quantify their existence. Do we measure a person’s life by its longevity or by assessing the warmth of its blaze? Do we measure a person by their brainpower or by the heartiness of his or her spine? Do earthy deeds count for more than intellectual opinions? What is more important, the work that a person produces or the quality of life that effuses from their being? Does it matter how we live and how we die, if we love or hate, are kind or mean, generous or stingy? Does it matter that we struggle to express personal doubts and toil in an effort to obtain redemption for our personal lapses?

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Civilization could not exist without tremors of desire and without the counteracting, negation force of disciplined denial. Nor would the gyratory pulsations of a lively civilization exist devoid of the convulsive chemistry of union and repellency. We are born with a desire to be immortal. Cursed with the knowledge that we must die, people live their orthodox lives out by displaying reckless abandon as to the outcome of human life or nervously hounded by utter despondency nipping their heels. How we resolve this decidedly human complex of carrying out our daily lives while burden by our inescapable mortality determines our essential character. The collation of similar values adopted by our community determines who we are as a people.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

You have everything inside you, though you sometimes only recognise certain bits relating to the current stage of your path.

~ Jay Woodman

All knowledge begins with an expression of curiosity pertaining to the unknown or unknowable. Expressions of uncertainty and a doubtful nature lead a person to useful discoveries.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Failure generates its own majesty. Defeat becomes a panoptic stain on the soul; it creates its own all-embracing pathos. Reverses engulf us in fleshy feelings of self-pity, sorrow, and apathy. Resounding setbacks might even be subtlety attractive because it means we can give up trying. It is tempting to accept defeat, surrender to our insecurities, and admit that because of failing to accomplish one particular goal that the best part of our life was wasted. Cynically writing ourselves off as a failure, we are free to capitulate to the emptiness of our lives.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Age 50 is the mile marker where any mildly perceptive person becomes acutely aware that he or she alone is accountable for the content and coherence of their character.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Americans share an affinity to establish a distinctive identity and know one’s self in a physiological, psychological, and spiritual sense, and we strive to attain self-actualization, self-realization, and/or bliss.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The act of writing is a contemplative vision quest, a somber expedition of discovery that requires the writer to subordinate their ego in order to travel in soulful solitude towards a desirable personal haven of rejuvenating enlightenment. Writing for personal growth entails unconditionally surrendering oneself to the struggle of tearing their sense of self apart. It demands the solemn willpower to dissect and analyze the fissures of a self-absorbent soul one layer at a time.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster