What is personal development? Essentially, it is the process of a person working toward achieving his or her full potential. That can mean different things to different people.
What seems like the smallest hint of progress to one person might seem like a big step in the right direction to another person. The entire process is very personal. Each person should measure their progress against themselves, where they started, and where they want to be. Never measure your personal growth against another person.
Sometimes, that process is discouraging. At those times, it’s best to get some outside encouragement. That encouragement can come from a variety of places, such as friends and family. It could come from the words of others, such as personal growth quotes found online. What are the right personal growth quotes to encourage and motivate you? This article contains a list of empowering personal growth quotes to inspire you to keep working to become your best self.
Personal growth quotes:
Self growth quotes:
- “Be the change you want to see in this world.” – Gandhi
- “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” — Will Durant
- “But until a person can say deeply and honestly, “I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday,” that person cannot say, “I choose otherwise.” – Stephen R. Covey
- “What we think, we become.” – Buddha
- “One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.” – Abraham Maslow
- “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” – Albert Einstein
- “Permit yourself to change your mind when something is no longer working for you.” – Nedra Glover Tawwab
- “You have to begin to tell the story of your life as you now want it to be and discontinue the tales of how it has been or of how it is.” – Esther and Jerry Hicks
- “Growth begins when we begin to accept our own weakness.” – Jean Vanier
- “Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound.” – James Allen
- “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
- “Personal development is a major time-saver. The better you become, the less time it takes you to achieve your goals.” – Brian Tracy
- “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” ― Mark Twain
- “As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.” – Rumi
- “A man who finds no satisfaction in himself will seek for it in vain elsewhere.” — La Rochefoucauld
- “Be patient with yourself. You are growing stronger every day. The weight of the world will become lighter…and you will begin to shine brighter. Don’t give up.” – Robert Tew
- “Personal development is the belief that you are worth the effort, time, and energy needed to develop yourself.” ― Denis Waitley
- “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” – Albert Einstein
- “The swiftest way to triple your success is to double your investment in personal development.” – Robin Sharma
- “Growth is the great separator between those who succeed and those who do not. When I see a person beginning to separate themselves from the pack, it’s almost always due to personal growth.” – John C Maxwell
- “There’s only one investment that will never go down — an investment in yourself.” ― Frank Sonnenberg
- “We can’t become what we need to be by remaining what we are.” – Oprah Winfrey
- “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” – Albert Einstein
- “The only journey is the journey within.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
- “Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own.” — Bruce Lee
- “Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one’s potential.” – Bruce Lee
- “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” – Viktor E. Frankl
- “The important thing is that we must be constantly moving forward – yes, the progressive realization of a predetermined goal. And our growth should never end.” – OgMandino
- “The only time you fail is when you fall down and stay down.” ― Stephen Richards
- “If you don’t behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.” ― Fulton J. Sheen
- “Don’t go through life, grow through life.” – Eric Butterworth
- “Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they’re supposed to help you discover who you are.” – Bernice Johnson Reagon
- “A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.” — Edward Bulwer-Lytton
- Believe in yourself, your abilities and your own potential. Never let self-doubt hold you captive. You are worthy of all that you dream of and hope for.” ― Roy T. Bennett
- “We are either moving forward or moving backward. There is no such thing as standing still.”― Becky Williamson-Martin
- “Treat yourself as you are, and you will remain as you are. Treat yourself as you could be, and you will become what you should be.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Learn to work harder on yourself than on your job.” – Jim Rohn
- “How hurtful it can be to deny one’s true self and live a life of lies just to appease others.” ― June Ahern
- “The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it. Rather, it’s that we aim too low and we reach it.” – Michelangelo
- “Recognizing that you are not where you want to be is a starting point to begin changing your life.” – Deborah Day
- “Without continuous personal development, you are now all that you will ever become.” – Eli Cohen
- “Do not let the memories of your past limit the potential of your future. There are no limits to what you can achieve on your journey through life, except in your mind.” ― Roy T. Bennett
- “Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.” — Bruce Lee
- “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” — George Bernard Shaw
- “You are essentially who you create yourself to be and all that occurs in your life is the result of your own making.” – Stephen Richards
- “By doing the work to love ourselves more, I believe we will love each other better.” – Laverne Cox
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Relationships with others:
- “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” – Buddha
- “A good criterion for measuring success in life is the number of people you have made happy.” — Robert J. Lumsden
- “It’s your life; you don’t need someone’s permission to live the life you want. Be brave to live from your heart.” ― Roy T. Bennett
- “Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” – Albert Einstein
- “If the people in your circle aren’t contributing to your growth, then you’re not in a circle… you’re in a cage.”― Kianu Starr
- “Dependent people need others to get what they want. Independent people can get what they want through their own efforts. Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.” — Stephen Covey
- “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”- Edith Wharton
- “Don’t take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.” – Don Miguel Ruiz
- “We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.” – Henry Ward Beecher
- “I don’t have to be what nobody else wants me to be and I am not afraid to be what I want to be.” — Muhammad Ali
- “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” — Dr. Seuss
- “Keep away from small people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you too can become great.” — Mark Twain
- “Forgive the past. It is over. Learn from it and let go. People are constantly changing and growing. Do not cling to a limited, disconnected, negative image of a person in the past. See that person now. Your relationship is always alive and changing.” ― Brian Weiss
Struggles and hard work:
- “Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.” – Carrie Fisher
- “I’ve got a theory that if you give 100% all the time, somehow things will work out in the end.” – Larry Bird
- “The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.” — Jimmy Johnson
- “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” Mark Twain
- “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- “Ability may take you to the top, but it takes character to stay there.” — William Blake
- “The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.” – Amelia Earhart
- “In our struggle for freedom, truth is the only weapon we possess.” – The Dalai Lama
- “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” – Paulo Coelho
- “You can waste your lives drawing lines. Or you can live your life crossing them.” – Shonda Rhimes
- “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor Frankl
- “Outstanding people have one thing in common: an absolute sense of mission.” – Zig Ziglar
- “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” — Helen Keller
- “Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.” – Babe Ruth
- “Sometimes in life we take a leap of faith. Remember, the leap is not about getting from one side to the other. It’s simply about taking the leap…and trusting the air, the universal breath, will support your wings so that you may soar.” – Kristi Bowman
- “Our attitude toward life determines life’s attitude toward us.” – John N. Mitchell
- “Reality is a projection of your thoughts or the things you habitually think about.” ― Stephen Richards
- “When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you…never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.” – Harriet Beecher Stowe
- “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” – Frederick Douglass
- “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” – Thomas Jefferson
- “What holds most people back isn’t the quality of their ideas, but their lack of faith in themselves. You have to live your life as if you are already where you want to be.” – Russell Simmons
- “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” — Napoleon Hill
- “I would like to think that all of my successes in life are really just the fruit of my failures.” – Yvie Oddly
- “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.” — Vince Lombardi
- “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.” – Eckhart Tolle
- “The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning ‘heart.’ Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage, other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.” – Rollo May
- “We find it normal for a child to be afraid of the dark, but we should never find it normal for an adult to be afraid of the light.” – Robin Sharma
- “There is one single thread binding my way together…the way of the Master consists in doing one’s best…that is all.” – Confucius
- “The more you believed in yourself, the more you could trust yourself. The more you trust yourself, the less you compare yourself to others.” ― Roy T. Bennett
- “As the physically weak man can make himself strong by careful and patient training, so the man of weak thoughts can make them strong by exercising himself in right thinking.” – James Allen
- “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” – Jane Goodall
- “We can do anything we want to if we stick to it long enough.” – Helen Keller
- “You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.” ― Joseph Campbell
- “Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.” – Ella Fitzgerald
- “Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” ― Dr. Seuss
- “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” – Maya Angelou
- “I do not think there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.” — John D. Rockefeller
- “If you can’t fly, then run if you can’t run, then walk if you can’t walk, then crawl whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.” – Martin Luther King
- “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” ― Anne Frank
- “Of course motivation is not permanent. But then, neither is bathing; but it is something you should do on a regular basis.” – Zig Ziglar
- “Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement.” – W. Clement Stone
- “Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you have power over instead of craving control over what you don’t.” – Steve Maraboli
Happiness:
- “A man’s true delight is to do the things he was made for.” – Marcus Aurelius
- “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picasso
- “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” ― Michael Cunningham
- “Happiness comes from within. It is not dependent on external things or on other people. You become vulnerable and can be easily hurt when your feelings of security and happiness depend on the behavior and actions of other people. Never give your power to anyone else.” ― Brian Weiss
- “Take responsibility of your own happiness, never put it in other people’s hands.” ― Roy T. Bennett
- “We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world” – Helen Keller
- “People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you’re fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly.” — Elizabeth Gilbert
- “If you are moving forward in your life, ifyou are progressing personally, professionally emotionally, spiritually–you will be happy.” – Tony Robbins
- “They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.” – Confucius
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