On Potential

‘Most people live…in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into the habit of using only his little finger.’
— William James

‘Compared with what we ought to be, we are but half-awake.’
— William James

‘It’s amazing what ordinary people can do if they set out without preconceived notions.’
— Charles F. Kettering

‘There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.’
— Søren Kierkegaard

‘It looks as if there were a single ultimate goal for mankind, a far goal toward which all persons strive. This is called variously by different authors self-actualization, self-realization, integration, psychological health, individuation, autonomy, creativity, productivity, but they all agree that this amounts to realizing the potentialities of the person, that is to say, becoming fully human, everything that person can be.’
— Abraham Maslow

‘The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy, man’s tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities. By this I mean the organic and human life, the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature – the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, or the self.’
— Carl Rogers

‘The true function of logic…as applied to matters of experience,…is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is.’
— Bertrand Russell

‘To be where we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end in life.’
— Robert Louis Stevenson

‘Whatever one man is capable of conceiving, other men will be able to achieve.’
— Jules Verne