Quotations

We are not born all at once, but by bits.  The body first, and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful.  Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth. 
- Mary Antin

The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that.  We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love. 
- Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker

Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like.  She is a person who understands, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not. 
- Virginia Satir

It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between that we fear....It's like being between trapezes.  It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer.  There's nothing to hold on to. 
- Marilyn Ferguson

Man cannot discover new oceans until he has courage to lose sight of the shore.
- Anonymous

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are, quite naturally, impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. 
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability...and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.

Your ideas mature gradually; let them grow, without undue haste.
Don't try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.

Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin S.J.