Capacity Quotes - Page 27

• The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.

  Arthur Koestler

  Men, Self, Church

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• If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.

  May Sarton

  Artist, Self, Joy

  May Sarton (2014). “Journal of a Solitude”, p.52, Open Road Media

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• If you practice in accord with your individual capacity, little by little you will find more pleasure and joy in it. As you gain inner strength, your positive actions will gain in profundity and scope.

  Dalai Lama

  Practice, Joy, Inner Strength

  Dalai Lama (2009). “For the Benefit of All Beings: A Commentary on the Way of the Bodhisattva”, p.87, Shambhala Publications

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• A life alert to simple pleasures, with perception cultivated and attuned to beauty, and a large capacity for friendship can serve us well come what may.

  Stephanie Mills

  Simple, Perception, May

  Stephanie Mills (2003). “Epicurean Simplicity”, p.206, Island Press

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• The more various our artificial necessities, the wider is our circle of pleasure; for all pleasure consists in obviating necessities as they rise; luxury, therefore, as it increases our wants, increases our capacity for happiness

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Circles, Luxury, Want

  Oliver Goldsmith (1835). “His Works”, p.30

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• [The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation--and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear…which binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.

  Joseph Conrad

  Dream, Art, Pain

  Joseph Conrad (2007). “The Portable Conrad”, p.48, Penguin

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• Leisure and the cultivation of human capacities are inextricably interdependent.

  Margaret Mead

  Leisure, Cultivation, Humans

  Margaret Mead, Rhoda Bubendey Métraux (1979). “Margaret Mead, some personal views”, Angus & Robertson

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• The eye is not open when it is limited to the passive role of a mirror... if it has only the capacity to reflect.

  Andre Breton

  Eye, Mirrors, Roles

  "Arshile Gorky: Goats on the Roof : a Life in Letters and Documents". Book by Arshile Gorky, 2009.

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• The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.

  Lewis Mumford

  Art, Becoming, Transformation

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• Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.

  Lewis Mumford

  Growth, Birth, Immortality

  Lewis Mumford (2016). “The Culture of Cities”, p.25, Open Road Media

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• Today the real test of America's power and wisdom is not our capacity to make war but our capacity to prevent it. Prevention must be our overriding objective. It can be done. Surrendering to the inevitability of combat only paves the way for its occurring.

  Dale E. Turner

  Peace, Real, War

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• You must know that there are different tastes. There are also different powers of digestion... different temperaments... differences in the capacity to comprehend.

  Ramakrishna

  Differences, Different, Taste

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• Psychic health depends on orgastic potency, i.e., upon the degree to which one can surrender to and experience the climax of excitation in the natural sexual act. It is founded upon the healthy character attitude of the individual's capacity for love. Psychic illnesses are the result of a disturbance of the natural capacity for love.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Attitude, Health, Character

  Wilhelm Reich (1973). “The Discovery of the Orgone”

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• Positive self-esteem operates as, in effect, the immune system of the consciousness, providing resistance, strength, and a capacity for regeneration. When self-esteem is low, our resilience in the face of life's adversities is diminished. We crumble before vicissitudes that a healthier sense of self could vanquish. We tend to be more influenced by the desire to avoid pain than to experience joy. Negatives have more power over us than positives.

  Nathaniel Branden

  Pain, Self Esteem, Adversity

  Nathaniel Branden (1992). “Power of Self Esteem”

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• If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for.

  Vaclav Havel

  Accomplishment, Needs, Driven

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• God has neither form nor shape under which we can know Him; when he speaks of Himself in metaphors and similes, He is adapting Himself to our foolishness, our limited capacity.

  Christina, Queen of Sweden

  Shapes, Speak, Metaphor

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• One must develop skills that stretch capacities, that make one more than what one is.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Skills

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• There is a case for saying that the creation of new aesthetic forms has been the most fundamentally productive of all forms of human activity. Whoever creates new artistic conventions has found methods of interchange between people about matters which were incommunicable before. The capacity to do this has been the basis of the whole of human history.

  John Zachary Young

  People, Matter, Originality

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• Faith is the capacity of the soul to perceive the abiding, the invisible in the visible.

  Leo Baeck

  Soul, Abiding, Invisible

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• I do assert that one prepares for eternity not by being religious and keeping the rules, but by living fully, loving wastefully, and daring to be all that each of us has the capacity to be.

  John Shelby Spong

  Religious, Christianity, Eternity

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• I've always wanted to serve my country in some capacity. But many years ago, my father said he wanted me to run the brewery and he'd do politics.

  Pete Coors

  Country, Running, Father

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• It is to aid in making the arts operative rather than only positively or negatively pleasurable... it is to paint a record, in so far as I am increasingly capable, of man's deepst capacities... I seek to paint of how form manifests its subtlest quality named 'idea.

  Morris Graves

  Art, Men, Ideas

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• Men and women both have an equal capacity to make money, but they want money for different reasons. Men want money for power and women want it for comfort, and usually not their own comfort, but the comfort of others in their lives.

  Suze Orman

  Men, Want, Comfort

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• We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are... That we actually have the guts, the perserverance, the capacity... because, if it's true, then we become estranged from all we know.

  Steven Pressfield

  Thinking, Perserverance, Promised Land

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• There are some people whom you have in life who have the capacity for real, passionate commitment to something, and sometimes you may be passionately committed to the same thing.

  Warren Beatty

  Real, Commitment, People

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