A man is like a tree: in a forest of his fellows he will grow as straight as his generic and individual nature permits; alone in the open, he yields to the deforming stresses and tortions that environ him.

The whole world will become a home to all of us, or none of us can hope to live on it, peacefully. But much of the American dream mistakenly supposes that, like a tree, we will grow and flourish, standing in one place where we murmur doomed declarations about our roots, about finding our roots, or putting down roots. In fact, of course, if we remain where we start from we will neither grow nor flourish.

If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and re-planted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.

No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.

If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

We can't become what we need to be by remaining what we are.

But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.

We cannot become what we need by remaining what we are.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

It is not the failure that holds us back but the reluctance to begin over again that causes us to stagnate.

Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends; Nature and man can never be fast friends. Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!

I don't think anyone can grow unless he's loved exactly as he is now, appreciated for what he is rather than what he will be.