Quotes & Sayings About Being Able To Do Anything

It is a ruse of the devil, by which he deceives good people, to induce them to do more than they are able, so that they end up not being able to do anything. The spirit of God urges one gently to do the good that can be done reasonably, so that it may be done perseveringly and for a long time. — Vincent De Paul

I've been asked before, "Who are your heroes?" and these types of questions. I always find it hard to identify a single person or a single book or this sort of thing. I've always been forward looking. I was raised with the notion that you can do pretty much anything you want. You're able to accomplish anything you set out to accomplish. I was given a sense of confidence and I never really felt the need to
or I've never had the benefit, I should probably say
of being inspired by outside heroes. — Pierre Omidyar

I can't think of anything outside of having the gift yourself and creating yourself. I can't think of the next better thing to do than being able to put it back. Creative expression, I think, is vital to the success of any society ... A society without art will die. — Robert Redford

Freedom is about a way of thinking. Freedom is about understanding that you can do anything that you want and freedom is about being able to take information and education and make it relevant to your own growth every single day. Freedom is not staying in the box. Freedom is not doing what other people want you to do. — Stedman Graham

Not being assaulted is not a privilege to be earned through the judicious application of personal safety strategies. A woman should be able to walk down the street at 4 in the morning in nothing but her socks, blind drunk, without being assaulted, and I, for one, am not going to do anything to imply that she is in any way responsible for her own assault if she fails to Adequately Protect Herself. Men aren't helpless dick-driven maniacs who can't help raping a vulnerable woman. It disrespects EVERYONE. — Emily Nagoski

I admired her lack of compunction, the courage of her bad manners, the energy of simple rage. Throwing a bag of spaghetti had a simplicity to it, a recklessness, a careless grandeur. It got things over with. I was a long way, then, from being able to do anything like it myself. — Margaret Atwood

I'm not trying to win an award for being the best vegetarian, just want to be healthy. Take a salt bath. Do things that my parents were never able to do. I'm blessed to do anything I want, so I decide to take the best care of my body and my family in the same way. Holistically. Vitally. — Erykah Badu

He felt safe with her. He'd never been safe with another human being, not since he'd been taken as a child from his home. He'd never been able to trust. He could never give that last small piece - all that was left of his humanity - into someone else's keeping. And now there was Rikki. She let him be whatever he had to be to survive. She didn't ask anything of him. There was no hidden motive. No agenda. Just acceptance. She was different - imperfect, or so she thought - and she knew what it was like to fight to carve out a space for herself. She was willing for him to do thar. — Christine Feehan

I was invited to visit a friend who was very sick ... When I came to him, he said to me, "Henri, here I am lying in this bed, and I don't even know how to think about being sick. My whole way of thinking about myself is in terms of action, in terms of doing things for people. My life is valuable because I've been able to do many things for many people. And suddenly, here I am, passive, and I can't do anything anymore."
As we talked I realized that he and many others were constantly thinking, "How much can I still do?" Somehow this man had learned to think about himself as a man who was worth only what he was doing. And so when he got sick, his hope seemed to rest on the idea that he might get better and return to what he had been doing. If the spirit of this man was dependent on how much he would still be able to do, what did I have to say to him? — Henri J.M. Nouwen

I wanted, as all men do, to belong.
To what? To an America alive, an America that was no longer a despised cultural foster child of Europe, with unpleasant questions always being asked about its parentage, to an America that had begun to be conscious of itself as a living home-making folk, to an America that had at last given up the notion that anything worth while could ever be got by being in a hurry, by being dollar rich, by being merely big and able to lick some smaller nation with one hand tied behind its broad national back. — Sherwood Anderson

Papa, do you believe there is any meaning to life?" I blurted out. "I don't not believe" he said sternly. "I know. The meaning of life - the meaning of a single, individual human life, since I assume that is what you are asking - consists of figuring out the one thing you are great stand then pushing mankind's mastery of that one thing as far as you are able, be it an inch or a mile. If you are a carpenter, be a carpenter with every ounce of your being and invent a new type of saw. If you are an archaeologist, find the tomb of Alexander the Great. If you are Alexander the Great, conquer the world. And never to anything by half — Olga Grushin

He came around to open my door and held out his hand to me. The gesture said more than what the eye could see. He could have easily lifted me out of the car without me being able to do anything to stop him but instead he was asking for my consent. To accept what was about the happen. — B.B. Reid

Would you really fight for him?" I nod.
But the nod isn't enough, so I go on.
"In fact, I would tear through rubble with my bare hands to get to him. I would lift cars. I would wrestle down anyone who said we shouldn't be together. I would stare down life and kick it in the ass if I had to. Because if you want to know the truth
if you really want to know the truth
none of that could be nearly as hard as being in love with him and not being able to tell anyone about it. Including him. I have this thing inside me, and it's angry and it's scared and it's uncertain and most of all it's so completely in love with him, and it would do anything to keep him, even if it means things staying the way they are now. — Nina LaCour

There is great value in being able to say "yes" when people ask if there is anything they can do. By letting people pick herbs or slice bread instead of bringing a salad, you make your kitchen a universe in which you can give completely and ask for help. The more environments with that atmospheric makeup we can find or create, the better. — Tamar Adler

This is part of the essence of motherhood, watching your kid grow into her own person and not being able to do anything about it. Otherwise children would be nothing more than pets. — Heather Armstrong

For what I can imagine and feel and think and hear, I can hardly do anything on the acoustic bass. It used to be just pure frustration of imagining so much more and being able to get to a certain level of execution. — Esperanza Spalding

He liked being big and strong. It gave him an identity. He'd been a shy, quiet, bookish kid, and that had been painful; now he was a big dumb guy, and nobody expected him to be able to do anything more than move a sofa into the next room on his own. Nobody until Laura, anyway. — Neil Gaiman

I was conscious all the time that I was following mad whims without being able to do anything about it ... . Despite my alienation from myself at that moment, and even though I was nothing but a battleground for invisible forces, I was aware of every detail of what was going on around me. — Knut Hamsun

I believe that our ability to worship God, to reaffirm our covenants and receive the healing power of the Holy Ghost, to receive the instruction we need in order to make personal progress - all of these things are greatly affected by how secure and safe we feel in our Church environment during the three-hour block of time on Sundays. If we have to spend our energy dealing with feelings that we are not accepted, being concerned about our appearance, or worrying that what we do or say will be judged harshly, in other words that the fellowship of our ward members is anything but "fixed, immovable, and unchangeable", we certainly won't be able to make the kind of progress we could make otherwise. — Virginia H. Pearce

Was a mirror that existed only in a mirror not just as real as its original? It fulfilled its role just as well as its counterpart - it reflected. Merle couldn't think of anything else that was able to do this: to do something without itself being. For the first time, she asked herself whether all mirrors were not always magic mirrors. "Mirrors can see," Arcimboldo had said. Now she believed him. — Kai Meyer

The fact that we represented freedom, you know. We talked about that in the songs and I think that the parents, like all parents, they want their kids to be in line and not go crazy or do anything too weird (laughs). And for some reason, I think, people identified The Doors as representing just being able to do whatever you wanted to do. — Robby Krieger

What is it, really, that we could lose if we handed ourselves over to the discernment of faith? Would we really lose anything except the illusion of control? This question suggests that there may be an idolatrous project underlying resistance to spiritual discernment: the desire for a decision-making process that we can predict and control.
But the obedience of faith offers no certainties, not even that of being certain of our our fidelity. We cannot know if the decision we make here and now are correct. We only know that they are the best we are able to make, and that in the future we might both regret them and need to change them. The reason has nothing to do with our sinfulness and everything to do with the fact that faith has to do with the Living God, who always moves ahead of us in surprising and sometimes shocking ways. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Heb. 10:31). — Luke Timothy Johnson

From lips indifferent of her death I heard,
Indifferently I listened to it, too,'
were echoing in my heart. O youth, youth! little dost thou care for anything; thou art master, as it were, of all the treasures of the universe - even sorrow gives thee pleasure, even grief thou canst turn to thy profit; thou art self-confident and insolent; thou sayest, 'I alone am living - look you!' - but thy days fly by all the while, and vanish without trace or reckoning; and everything in thee vanishes, like wax in the sun, like snow ... . And, perhaps, the whole secret of thy charm lies, not in being able to do anything, but in being able to think thou wilt do anything; lies just in thy throwing to the winds, forces which thou couldst not make other use of; in each of us gravely regarding himself as a prodigal, gravely supposing that he is justified in saying, 'Oh, what might I not have done if I had not wasted my time! — Ivan Turgenev

Competence means keeping your head in a crisis, sticking with a task even when it seems hopeless, and improvising good solutions to tough problems when every second counts. It encompasses ingenuity, determination and being prepared for anything.
Astronauts have these qualities not because we're smarter than everyone else (though let's face it, you do need a certain amount of intellectual horsepower to be able to fix a toilet). It's because we are taught to view the world - and ourselves - differently. My shorthand for it is "thinking like an astronaut." But you don't have to go to space to learn to do that.
It's mostly a matter of changing your perspective. — Chris Hadfield

I've basically been able to do everything, I basically run my own career and the decisions I make - whether it's how I'm gonna roll out music, how I'm gonna play on tours, different strategies for releasing and marketing things - and that comes from being college educated and someone who's interested in that side of the business rather than only the music. If anything I think that's where the biggest direct influence comes from. — Hoodie Allen

You get on the radio by writing your own songs. But we had the dilemma of not being able to play anywhere because we weren't able to play anything that anyone wanted to hear. So we learned songs that we thought that we could do without puking. — Wayne Kramer

When I was teaching basketball, I urged my players to try their hardest to improve on that very day, to make that practice a masterpiece.
Too often we get distracted by what is outside our control. You can't do anything about yesterday. The door to the past has been shut and the key thrown away. You can do nothing about tomorrow. It is yet to come. However, tomorrow is in large part determined by what you do today. So make today a masterpiece. You have control over that.
This rule is even more important in life than basketball. You have to apply yourself each day to become a little better. By applying yourself to the task of becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better. Only then will you will be able to approach being the best you can be. It begins by trying to make each day count and knowing you can never make up for a lost day. — John Wooden

There's nothing that I love to do more than act and I feel really lucky to be in the position that I'm in, being able to do it as my job! If I ever do anything other than act, it will be in show business. — Sophia Bush

We feel that, for the honour of God (and also, though we do not say this, for the sake of our own reputation as spiritual Christians), it is necessary for us to claim that we are, so to speak, already in the signal-box, here and now enjoying the inside information as to the why and wherefore of God's doings. This comforting pretence becomes part of us: we feel sure that God has enabled us to understand all His ways with us and our circle thus far, and we take if for granted that we shall be able to see at once the reason for anything that may happen to us in the future. And then something very painful and quite inexplicable comes along, and our cheerful illusion of being in God's secret councils is shattered. Our pride is wounded; we feel that God has slighted us; and unless at this point we repent, and humble ourselves very thoroughly for our former presumption, our whole subsequent spriritual life may be blighted. — J.I. Packer

This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? It doesn't help to try to change it to accord with your system of thought. The momentum of history behind it is too great for anything really significant to evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being. That's something else, and it can be done. — Joseph Campbell

We have just enough time and money to compare ourselves to others who have more time and money, and we think we should be able to accomplish everything they do and have, without being able to see the sacrifices others have made to have the things they do. We grew up learning we could do anything we put our minds to, but the reality is that you just can't have it all. So when we fail to live up to our own expectations, we think it is because of a problem within us instead of recognizing the very real limitations that come with having finite resources of time, money, and talent. — Jessica N. Turner

I don't believe in religion. I believe the example of Christ. I believe in the example of a perfect human being that if you can live for other people away from yourself you will be happy. If you live for yourself you will be unhappy and then you will not be able to sleep or do anything else ... finally. I think insofar, and I really believe this, insofar as people do live with the other fellow [God] in mind, they have to be happy you know? Because it raises you up. — Katharine Hepburn

The limitless opportunity of being able to do
anything is daunting, but it's also the most rewarding.
I'm having the time of my life. — Kody Chamberlain

I made a proposal to Peepy, in default of being able to do anything better for him, that he should let me wash him and afterwards lay him down on my bed again. To this he submitted with the best grace possible, staring at me during the whole operation as if he never had been, and never could again be, so astonished in his life - looking very miserable also, certainly, but making no complaint, and going snugly to sleep as soon as it was over. At first I was in two minds about taking such a liberty, but I soon reflected that nobody in the house was likely to notice it. — Charles Dickens

The most painful experience is to endure mental abuse and not being able to do anything about it. — Angela Brown

When you're writing for a sequel and there's a movie that's been deemed sacred ground by the fanbase that's the predecessor, you cannot do anything to tread on that, so it's a bit trickier than just being able to sit down and write something. — Troy Duffy

I don't think I ever expected anything like an Oscar ever, to tell you the truth. That is not my motivation when I do these roles. I really am motivated by being able to work with great people and create a body of work that I can look back and be proud of. — Leonardo DiCaprio

You can't do anything. You will be defeated here by me, on the ground helplessly while I kill this girl, being able only to watch. — Reki Kawahara

I think: there at the point where thought joins with me I am able to subtract myself from being, without diminishing, without changing, by means of a metamorphosis which saves me from myself, beyond any point of reference from which I might be seized. It is the property of my thought, not to assure me of existence (as all things do, as a stone does), but to assure me of being in nothingness itself, and to invite me not to be, in order te make me feel my marvelous absence. I think, said Thomas, and this visible, inexpressible, nonexistent Thomas I became meant that henceforth I was never there where I was, and there was not even anything mysterious about it. My existence became entirely that of an absent person who, in every act I performed, produced the same act and did not perform it. — Maurice Blanchot

As the dreamscape around me grows clearer, I slip further away from it. The mind is a magical thing, I'm discovering. A dreamscape is made of thought and is wider than the sky, able to grow large enough to fit not just our own world, but every possibility and impossibility beyond it. Once I quit thinking of it as being forced into the laws of physics, it's easy to manipulate the dreamscape into anything I want. I don't know how I know all this, no more than I understand how I know things when I dream. I just do.
I throw up my hand, and a wall rises between the orange grove and me. Behind the wall, I start creating the world I need in Representative Belles's mind. — Beth Revis

The padres set great store by addressing prayer to personal gods: 'Genuine prayer exists only in religions in which there is a God as a person and a shape and endowed with a will.'
That was stated by a famous Protestant. The anarch does not want to have anything to do with that conception. As for the One God: while he may be able to shape persons, he is not a person himself, and the he is already a patriarchal prejudice.
A neuter One is beyond our grasp, while man converses ten with the Many Gods on equal terms, whether as their inventor or as their discoverer. In any case, it is man who named the gods. This is not to be confused with a high level soliloquy. Divinity must, without a doubt, be inside us and recognized as being inside us; otherwise we would have no concept of gods. — Ernst Junger

What inspires me is the desire to be on. The desire to be successful. The desire to reach people through my music and make a living off it and never have to do anything else. Being able to do music full time and travel the world and share this music with everybody. That's the dream. — G-Eazy

I love the feeling of the weightlessness. I always love being in the water and to combine jumping off the side into the water feels like a different and fun way to be able to swim. I feel free like I could do anything — Tom Daley

A deaf composer's like a cook who's lost his sense of taste. A frog that's lost its webbed feet. A truck driver with his license revoked. That would throw anybody for a loop, don't you think? But Beethoven didn't let it get to him. Sure, he must have been a little depressed at first, but he didn't let misfortune get him down. It was like, Problem? What problem? He composed more than ever and came up with better music than anything he'd ever written. I really admire the guy. Like this Archduke Trio
he was nearly deaf when he wrote it, can you believe it? What I'm trying to say is, it must be tough on you not being able to read, but it's not the end of the world. You might not be able to read, but there are things only you can do. That's what you gotta focus on
your strengths. Like being able to talk with the stone. — Haruki Murakami

Performers love to perform - that's the thing that we do. I think one of the best things was being able to imagine anything that I wanted, anything that I came up with we could do, because this theater is unbelievable. — Cher

Moreover, knowing the "right answers" - knowing which ones they are, being able to identify them - does not mean we believe them. To believe them, like believing anything else, means that we are set to act as if they (the right answers) are true and that we will do so in appropriate circumstances. And acting as if the right answers are true means, in turn, that we intend to obey the example and teachings of Jesus the Anointed. What else would we intend if we believed he is who his people through the ages have declared him to be? — Dallas Willard

You see, playing music isn't work to me - I'd do it for free because being able to create music is a gift in itself. When God filled me with His Spirit after I gave my life to Jesus, I knew I was being given another gift - the most expensive gift that has ever been given. I felt like I'd won the ultimate lottery of the universe. I didn't have to do anything to get this gift; it was given to me simply because I wanted God. And that free gift made me want to give God everything in my life. — Brian Welch

I like being able to do anything. I think that's healthy, doing anything and everything, rather than just getting completely obsessed with one particular genre or particular kind of work. — Dave McKean

If the situation or problem is such that it can be remedied, then there is no need to worry about it. In other words, if there is a solution or a way out of the difficulty, then one needn't be overwhelmed by it. The appropriate action is to seek its solution. It is more sensible to spend the energy focusing on the solution rather than worrying about the problem. Alternatively, if there is no way out, no solution, no Possibility of resolution, then there is also no point in being worried about it, because you can't do anything about it anyway. In that case, the sooner you accept this fact, the easier it will be on you. This formula, of course, implies directly confronting the problem. Otherwise you won't be able to find out whether or not there is a resolution to the problem. — Dalai Lama XIV