The world is the perfect arena for personal growth

• Your life is a kind of laboratory where you’re constantly experimenting with your own higher knowing, always increasing your capacity to design the life you choose. Human beings must create; it’s hardwired. The question is, are you consciously creating or only sleepwalking through your human life? David Emerald
• Every situation, every moment, provides the opportunity for self- growth and development of your character. David Reynolds
• The spiritual being sees the physical world as an arena for growth and learning with the specific purpose of serving and evolving into higher levels of love. Wayne Dyer
• Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it! Ram Dass
• The entire universe is a university. Everything and everybody is a professor to us. We constantly learn from everybody and everything. We learn even more through pain than through pleasure. Whether we want it to or not, the world will give us the experiences we need and make us grow. Sri Swami Satchidananda
• Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. Pema Chodron
• All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind. Martin H. Fischer
• Everyone and everything around you is your teacher. Ken Keyes
• Life is trying things to see if they work. Ray Bradbury
• To live is to have problems and to solve problems is to grow intellectually. P. Guilford
• The world is your school. Martin H. Fischer
• We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our schoolmasters, and one from the world. The third contradicts all that the first two teach us. Charles Louis de Secondat
• Learning,  Growth,  Dedicate yourself to life-long learning,  Beginner’s mind

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Life is the best teacher there is

• What I know for sure is that your life is a multipart series of all your experiences – and each experience is created by your thoughts, intentions, and actions to teach you what you need to know. Your life is a journey of learning to love yourself first and then extending that love to others in every encounter. Oprah Winfrey
• The teacher you need is the person you’re living with. Byron Katie
• A total immersion in life offers the best classroom for learning to love. Leo Buscaglia
• Life is the only real teacher. It offers many experiences….But the lessons of experience are hidden.  Dan Millman
• Look at your life as your main career and your divine classroom. Judith Orloff
• There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• The world is but a school of enquiry. Michel de Montaigne
• The world has so many lessons to teach you. I consider the world, this Earth, to be like a school and our life the classrooms. Oprah Winfrey
• I believe that there’s a lesson in almost everything that you do and every experience. Oprah Winfrey
• The difference between school and life? In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson. Tom Bodett
• Life always gives us exactly the teacher we need at every moment. This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every obnoxious supervisor (or employee), every illness, every loss, every moment of joy or depression, every addiction, every piece of garbage, every breath. Every moment is the guru. Charlotte Joko Beck
• I’ve come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy. Tony Robbins
• Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn and you will. Vernon Howard
• Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. Pema Chodron
• Our lives teach us who we are. Salman Rushdie
• Realize that life is a school and you are here to learn. Problems are simply part of the curriculum that appear and fade away like algebra class but the lessons you learn will last a lifetime.
• The years teach much which the days never know. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. Helen Keller
• Acceptance and tolerance and forgiveness, those are life-altering lessons. Jessica Lange
• Sometimes life gives us lessons sent in ridiculous packaging. Dar Williams
• Life deals you a lot lessons, some people learn from it, some people don’t. Brett Favre
• Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns. Rachel Naomi Remen
• Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. Henry Ford
• Every moment in the earth school offers you important opportunities to learn about yourself. Those things have to do with your soul. The Earth school operates with exquisite perfection and efficiency whether you are aware of it or not. Gary Zukav
• The entire universe is a university. Everything and everybody is a professor to us. We constantly learn from everybody and everything. We learn even more through pain than through pleasure. Whether we want it to or not, the world will give us the experiences we need and make us grow. Sri Swami Satchidananda
• This world is your best teacher. There is a lesson in everything. There is a lesson in each experience. Learn it and become wise. Every failure is a stepping stone to success. Every difficulty or disappointment is a trial of your faith. Every unpleasant incident or temptation is a test of your inner strength. Therefore, nil desperandum. March forward hero! Sivananda Saraswati
• Learning

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There is no better teacher than experience

• In the deep, unwritten wisdom of life there are many things to be learned that cannot be taught. We never know them by hearing them spoken, but we grow into them by experience and recognize them through understanding. Anthony Hope
• In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration. Ansel Adams
• Life is a series of experiences, each of which makes us bigger, even though it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us in our marching onward. Henry Ford
• Life must be understood backwards; but… it must be lived forward. Soren Kierkegaard
• The experience to be gathered from books, though often valuable, is but of the nature of learning whereas the experience gained from actual life, is of the nature of wisdom and a small store of the latter is worth vastly more than a stock of the former. Samuel Smiles
• The difficulties we experience always illuminate the lessons we need most.
• Learning by experience often is painful – and the more it hurts, the more you learn. Ralph Banks
• Wisdom is meaningless until your own experience has given it meaning…and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom. Bergen Evens
• Don’t just learn something from every experience; learn something positive. Allen H. Neuharth
• By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. Confucius
• The only source of knowledge is experience. Albert Einstein
• Experience is more important than knowledge. Santosh Kalwar
• Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.  Aldous Leonard Huxley
• There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. Willa Cather
• Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn fast. William Nicholson
• All of life’s experiences are teachers in some sense, challenging us to grow and evolve. David Emerald
• We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction. Malcolm Gladwell
• Experience is not always the kindest of teachers, but it is surely the best. Spanish Proverb
• Life is the only real counsellor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue. Edith Wharton
• Experience is a good school, but the fees are high. Heinrich Heine
• Experience is the teacher of all things. Julius Caesar
• Experience

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Life is an especially good teacher if we are aware

• If we learn how to inhabit now more – with awareness – then it’s almost as if the universe becomes your teacher. Because there’s no boundary to awareness. Jon Kabat-Zinn
• Awareness,  Self-awareness,  Mindfulness

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Life teaches us as much (if not more) through our failures as our successes

• Success teaches us nothing; only failure teaches. Hyman G. Rickover
• Success is a poor teacher. Robert T. Kiyosaki
• Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know. William Saroyan
• We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do. And probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery. Samuel Smiles
• It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure. Bill Gates
• Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. John Dewey
• I think success has no rules, but you can learn a lot from failure. Jean Kerr
• It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done. Samuel Smiles
• Success tends to lock you in a pattern, and you get the attitude, “If it’s not broken, why fix it?” This attitude prevents you from experimenting and trying other approaches that in the long run may do you a lot more good.  Roger von Oech
• Failure

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Life teaches us much through our mistakes

• Strong people make as many and as ghastly mistakes as weak people. The difference is that strong people admit them, laugh at them, learn form them. This is how they become strong. Richard Needham
• You win some, you learn some.
• Some of the best lessons we ever learn, we learn from our mistakes and failures. The error of the past, is the wisdom and success of the future. Tyron Edwards
• We don’t make mistakes…we just have learnings. Anne Wilson Schaef
• There are no mistakes….. only discoveries! Ellie Walsh
• The value of action is that we make mistakes; mistakes show us what we need to learn. Peter McWilliams
• If you make mistakes it doesn’t matter. Make mistakes and learn. The best teachers are your own mistakes. You learn even faster by your mistakes. Sri Swami Satchidananda
• The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing. John Powell
• Making mistakes simply means you are learning faster. Weston Agor
• By seeking and blundering we learn. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• It’s amazing how much more you can learn by making mistakes than you can by making perfect decisions.
• I’ve learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success. Jack Welch
• Mistakes

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Life teaches us much through times of adversity and pain

• Sometimes the hardest lessons to learn are the ones your soul needs most. Kelly Cutrone
• Problems are spiritual lessons from God–spiritual lessons to be learned. Tony Robbins
• I am not afraid of storms… for I am learning to sail my ship. Louise May Alcott
• We would never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world. Helen Keller
• There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. Willa Cather
• We learn as much from sorrow as from joy, as much from illness as from health, from handicap as from advantage– and indeed perhaps more. Pearl S. Buck
• Whenever something negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it. Eckhart Tolle
• Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. Pema Chodron
• We learn even more through pain than through pleasure. Whether we want it to or not, the world will give us the experiences we need and make us grow. Sri Swami Satchidananda
• “What lesson can I learn from this misfortune? How can I improve my situation? How can I turn this lemon into a lemonade? Dale Carnegie
• Of all the virtues we can learn, no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Life should have challenges. Without challenges, it would be a bore. It is only in challenging situations that you really learn. Sri Swami Satchidananda
• Your pain is a school unto itself–– and your joy a lovely temple. Aberjhani
• Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us- and those around us – more effectively. Look for the learning.  Louisa May Alcott
• Adversity,  Pain,  Challenge

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Life doesn’t come with an instruction booklet and we have to learn as we go

• Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes. Hugh Prather
• Life is half spent before we know what it is. George Herbert
• I gave my life to learning how to live. Now that I have organized it all, it is just about over.  Sandra Hochman
• I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live. Jonathan Safran Foer
• Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Soren Kierkegaard
• In the book of life, the answers aren’t in the back. Peanuts character Charlie Brown
• Experience is the worst teacher because it gives the test before presenting the lesson. Vernon Law
• Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on. Samuel Butler
• The book of life is filled with incoherent riddles. Life’s true lessons are inscribed in a corner of the margin.  Jonathan Lockwood Huie

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Much of our learning is learning to understand life

• Life is a bliss only if you carefully understand it. Santosh Kalwar
• The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation; it is understanding. Winifred Holtby
• In youth, we learn; in age, we understand. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
• I’ve come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy. Tony Robbins
• That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way. Doris Lessing
• Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Marie Curie
• Learning is not the accumulation of knowledge, but rather, one thing only: understanding. Donna Jo Napoli
• Understanding,  Wisdom

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There is much to be learned from others

• No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals. Brian Tracy

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On a lighter note

• Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. Pete Seeger
• Experience is the comb life gives us after we’re bald. Belgian proverb
• Experience is what allows us to repeat our mistakes, only with more finesse. Derwood Fincher
• Experience is the worst teacher because it gives the test before presenting the lesson. Vernon Law
• Experience is that marvellous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when you make it again. P. Jones
• Just when I thought I knew all the answers, life started asking all the wrong questions.
• Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don’t.  Pete Seeger
• You live and learn. At any rate, you live.  Douglas Adams
• To the student I would say, “Life is principally multiple choice, but at the end there’s a tough essay question. Robert Brault

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