Quotes About Potential

Leavening the flat bread of what we know, with the yeast of what we dream may come to pass.

Never a truer word said or thought. Anything was possible.

Dream! Forge yourself and rise Out of your mind and into others. Men, be women. Fish, be flies. Girls, take beards. Sons, be your mothers. The future of the world now lies In coral wombs behind our eyes.

Imagination was true power: it worked transformations wealth and influence never could.

And why not? The world made miracles like this every moment of every day: egg into chick, seed into flower, maggot into fly. Now man into fox? was that possible? Oh yes, said the House of the World. Yes, and yes, and always yes-

The mind has exactly the same power as the hands: not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.

Man is a continent, but his conscious mind is no larger than a back garden…man consists almost entirely of unrealized potentials.

He learned from Novalis that every man is potentially hero and genius; that only inertia keeps men mediocre.

In time the saplings and hedges on the perimeter would provide shade and character; now they spoke of fine intentions.

The future? The future was the clay in their hands.

Literature can remind us that not all ife is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

All the lives we could live, all the people we would never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.

Like water, which heated to a hundred degrees will bear no increase of temperature, human thought attains in certain men its maximum intensity.

In this moment, there is plenty of time. In this moment, you are precisely as you should be. In this moment, there is infinite possibility. (17)

Sometimes you'll hear, 'People don't change.' This is true more often than it ought to be, but listen again: 'People don't change.' It says 'don't,' not 'can't.' (316)

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.' Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

In the concentration camps...we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.

Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something!

Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really us. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisreal on his lips.

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to be happy. But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to be happy. Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

the perception of meaning, as I see it, more specifically boils down to becoming aware of a possibility against the background of reality or, to express it in plain words, to becoming aware of what can be done about a given situation.

For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past/.../, wherein nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.

I never tire of saying that the only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities; but as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment; they are saved and delivered into the past, wherein they are rescued and preserved from transitoriness. For, in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.

Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.