Actuality And Potentiality Quotes & Sayings

If that one is already a great artist, who knows how to educe from a small piece of wood the face of a king or of a queen, an ant or a camel, how great then is the mastery which can form as actuality everything which is in all potentiality? Therefore, God, who is able to produce from the most minute piece of matter the similitude of all forms which can be in this world and in infinitely many worlds, is of admirable subtlety. — Nicholas Of Cusa

Human Error lies in judgment. While many will say that it's wrong to judge, one cannot survive in the light or the darkness without equipping the ability to judge. One must judge their morality. One must judge their potentiality. One must judge their actuality. One must judge their life. One must judge their very existence. What happens when God no longer lends a helping a hand? What happens when
God longer judges you? Only you can be the arbiter of your own existence. However, you will have to judge. So let me ask you, what's the difference between judging the subjective reality that one exists in, and judging the value of the subjective reality of another? The only difference lies is the sameness of one conception ... judgment. So tell me, is it wrong to judge others, when your very existence depends on you judging reality for validity? — Lionel Suggs

Man is the "ethical animal" ethical in potentiality even if, unfortunately, not in actuality. His capacity for ethical judgment like freedom, reason and the other unique characteristics of the human being is based upon his consciousness of himself. — Rollo May

The actuality of these spiritual qualities is thus imprisoned, though their potentiality be not quite destroyed; and thus a crass, extended, impenetrable, passive, divisible, unintelligent substance is generated, which we call matter.Cheyn.Phil. Prin. — Samuel Johnson

People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.
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She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort. — Wallace Stegner

I've never been so empty in my life. You took my soul with you. You took my heart. I'm this empty shell who goes through the motions every day, waiting for you to call me. Waiting until you answer my calls. — Abbi Glines

That's the way it is in our house, everybody knowing things but pretending they don't. — Claire Keegan

The enormous sense of the potentiality for success and failure, and the prospect of triumphs and tragedies, hoover over collegiate students jubilant and anguish filled, animated actuality. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I remember my first reading of The Communist Manifesto, which Marx and Engels wrote when they too were young radicals; Marx was thirty, Engels twenty-eight. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle." That was undeniably true, verifiable in any reading of history. Certainly true for the United States, despite all the promises of the Constitution ("We the people of the United States ... " and "No state shall deny ... the equal protection of the laws"). — Howard Zinn

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything ... All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all? — Jonathan Safran Foer

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past. — Hannah Arendt

To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) - this is the perpetual illusion of morality. — Giorgio Agamben

Radical or revolutionary consciousness . . . is the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed - and finally it is the discovery of oneself as one of the oppressed who must unite to transform the objective conditions of their existence in order to resolve the contradiction between potentiality and actuality. Revolutionary consciousness leads to the struggle for one's own freedom in unity with others who share the burden of oppression. — Greg Calvert

I'm a permanently curious person. I probably waste my time being curious about things that have got nothing to do with the business sometimes. What keeps me alive, certainly, is curiosity. — Rupert Murdoch

Always make the best of the best, and never make bad worse. — Lord Chesterfield

There are some men who are counted great because they represent the actuality of their own age, and mirror it as it is. Such an one was Voltaire, of whom it was epigrammatically said: 'he expressed everybody's thoughts better than anyone.' But there are other men who attain greatness because they embody the potentiality of their own day and magically reflect the future. They express the thoughts which will be everybody's two or three centuries after them. Such as one was Descartes. — Thomas Henry Huxley