Personal Growth Quotes

Journey through the Power of the Rainbow represents a condensed compendium of literary efforts from a life dedicated to transforming the themes of injustice, grief, and despair that we all encounter during some unavoidable point of our existence into a sustainable life-affirming poetics of passionate creativity, empowered spiritual vision, and inspired commitment.

~ Aberjhani

Gossip: a weed watered by wayward words.

~ Soul Dancer

The shadow is dark and the woods are cold, but they are not endless. No matter how lost you are now, you are not lost forever. You are findable.Love just keeps on looking. Love is forever tries.

~ Anna White

Your journey on earth is personal journey of life.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety.

~ Josh Waitzkin

Possibly, he was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights, sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more practised with the world. As all is activity and vicissitude to the new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had undergone a kind of new creation, after its longsuspended life.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

There are diverse styles of learning, problem solving, and a range of methodologies that a person can draw from in order to structure their thoughts or intentionally revise ingrained personal habits including both systematic and unsystematic approaches. Problems solving styles are reflective of personal differences in the manner that people prefer to position themselves in respect to the phenomena in the world and efficiently react to alterations in the external environment. Problem solving strategies encompass numerous variances in what manner a person approaches new concepts, how they manage their daily affairs, and respond effectively to new opportunities and complex challenges.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If you want to go to places worth going, you have to be open to personal growth. No matter how much your job pays you, if it doesn’t offer you the opportunity to grow, your efforts would only go to waste. There are really just some things that money can’t buy. Never stop learning!

~ Kevin J. Donaldson

We seek to understand Jiu Jitsu as a vehicle to understand ourselves. We have different explicit goals, from getting in shape, learning self-defense or competition, but tacitly we all seek mastery of ourselves.

~ Chris Matakas

Jiu Jitsu is meant to serve us, not the other way around. It is meant to make you more of whatever it is you already are. It is meant to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is meant to bring to conscious attention all that once went unseen. It is meant to make you more loving. It is meant to make you more wise, but less certain. It is meant to make us humble, yet supremely confident. It is meant to remind us of our frailty while simultaneously making us feel invincible.

~ Chris Matakas

If Jiu Jitsu does not make you a better father, son, mother, daughter, wife or husband, you are missing the point. If Jiu Jitsu does not leave you viewing strangers in a kinder light, you are missing the point. If you are not better equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of life due to your training, then you are not really training.

~ Chris Matakas

Jiu Jitsu has shown me that we are not confined to the lot which we inherit. We are not bound to these fetters eternally. They are temporal. We can transcend them should we sincerely choose to. Sincere effort is in fact the rarest virtue among man.

~ Chris Matakas

I wanted to get to the most essential aspect of my being, and look around for a while. I wanted to explore what I am in my most basic self. I wanted to chip away at all of the nonsense I have acquired through my twenty-nine years on this earth. I wanted to find truth. Thoreau went to the woods. I went to the mats. Jiu Jitsu has peeled the veil of daily life, and has shown me what lies beyond the curtain. We willingly accept the chains that circumstance forces upon us, and we grow to find comfort in them. We attach various fetters of day-to-day living to our being, and we do so with a smile. We accept these constraints for they come in the way of comfort. We accept conformity for it appears the path of least resistance. We strive toward the middle, and we run from ourselves.

~ Chris Matakas

Thoreau went to the woods. I went to the mats.

~ Chris Matakas

We call it training. Not because we are training for Jiu Jitsu. We are training for life.

~ Chris Matakas

I have seen far by seeing through the lens of Jiu Jitsu. I have exchanged a great deal of physical health for these insights, and these were trades worth making. My efforts were worth the return. I have sacrificed much in the name of this craft. Not for trophies or belts or prestige. For these fall away like dust. I pursued this art so fervently because it was not actually Jiu Jitsu I pursued. It was myself.

~ Chris Matakas

The greatest fulfillment, personal development.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Sometimes your belief system is really your fears attached to rules.

~ Shannon L. Alder

For things I am not thankful for―experiences I would never volunteer to relive―I recognize how they have changed me. My depth of compassion and humility, the sincerity of my empathy and understanding, and the duration of my patience have all been refined by bitter suffering. I thank God for the lessons learned. I am a better person for it, but I still abhor those awful trials.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

What you learn is your personal treasure. No one can take it away from you.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

First we crawl. Later we crawl on broken glass.

~ Scott Meyers

You take a step, then another. That’s the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it’s a remaking of your own mind.

~ Orson Scott Card

I remembered learning from my favorite professor at Belmont to “surround yourself with people who are better than you,” and I was now living that mantra.

~ Kimberly Novosel

Living on the verge is not about doing more, but about being more. It isn’t about achieving more; it’s about experiencing more. It’s not about being someone different, as there ’s no “better version of you” on the horizon. Everything you’re searching for is available to you in this moment. Everything you need is right here on the verge.

~ Cara Bradley

Love can flow like the river, fly with the bird, sing with the crickets at night. It is in the energy of the river, the flight of the bird, the song from the cricket. There is nowhere where love is not.

~ Janet G. Nestor

Once your heart overflows with love, another heart will follow. And so it goes. Yeshua: One Hundred Meaningful Messages for Messengers

~ Janet G. Nestor

There are lots of real reasons to decide to leave something or someone, but there are lots of other reasons that are less valid and less real and less about a relationship than our own minds: Fear (of screwing up, of being left, of not being good enough), restlessness, resistance to growing up, PMS, not knowing how to live without drama, fearing that you're getting happy, and happiness is boring. The thing that scared me the most was the knowledge that if I stayed, something was going to change, and that something was probably me. I didn't know what changed me would look like, or if I would like her more or less than I already did. Would I still recognize myself? Would I still be myself?

~ Anna White

Your soul does not give you your dreams if you don’t have what it takes inside to achieve them.

~ Eileen Anglin

Start and end your day with God.Seek His presence and blessing daily.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Make the right choicesFor the right reasonsand the right things will happen.

~ Charles F. Glassman

Forgiving someone else doesn't give them a free pass. It gives you a free pass to move on.

~ Charles F. Glassman

Controlling unwanted thoughts is not the problem. Believing, thrusting, and taking direction from them is.

~ Charles F. Glassman

In order to reach for the stars, you must have both feet planted firmly on the ground.

~ Charles F. Glassman

When I remove the layers that say I can't, I discover a burning ember that says I should, I can, and I will.

~ Charles F. Glassman

You won't find your soul in a textbook, self-help book, or buy it in a store. Sometimes, it's just a matter of looking past the anger, regret, and envy to see its smiling face.

~ Charles F. Glassman

Whether we're forgiving our parents or someone else or ourselves, the laws of mind remain the same.  As we love, we shall be released from pain and as we deny love, we shall remain in pain.  Each of us have different fears and different manifestations of fear,  but all of us are saved by the same technique:  The call to God to save our lives by salvaging our minds.  'Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.  For love is the kingdom and love is the glory and love is the power, forever and forever.

~ Marianne Williamson

It is very important to understand why those annoying people annoy you and then figure out where that fits into your world.

~ Auliq Ice

It’s taken years, but part of my own personal growth has involved deciding that I can learn something from even the most annoying person.

~ Auliq Ice

It is very humbling to see my own character defects in someone who annoys me. At the end of the day, I realize they have actually prompted positive change in me.

~ Auliq Ice

Life is constantly teaching us that we are mirrors of one another and that no one is an island!

~ Auliq Ice