Quotes & Sayings About Human Potentials

Let us consider humanity a biogram (the basic DNA blueprint of the human organism and its potentials) united with a logogram (this set of "conditioned verbal habits"). The biogram has not changed in several hundred thousand years; the logogram is different in each society. — Robert Shea

As a society emphasizes and values some aspects of the total range of human potentials more than others, the valued aspects are associated closely with, and limited to, the dominant group's domain. — Jean Baker Miller

The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market. — William S. Burroughs

The ability to try to understand existence, the ability to try to recognize the wonder and responsibility of one's own existence, the ability to know even fractionally the almost annihilating beauty, ambiguity, darkness, and horror which swarm every instant of every consciousness, the ability to try to accept it, or the ability to try to defend one's self, or the ability to dare to try to assist others; all such as these, of which most human beings are cheated of their potentials, are, in most of those who even begin to discern or wish for them, the gifts or thefts of economic privilege, and are available to members of these leanest classes only by the rare and irrelevant miracle of born and surviving 'talent. — James Agee

Each human being is bred with a unique set of potentials that yearn to be fulfilled as surely as the acorn yearns to become the oak within it. — Aristotle.

The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. 'Faking it' in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one's nature, and it will always fail. — Parker J. Palmer

I got fed up with the human race, really. I got a very negative feeling about human potentials. And for a while, I thought I might write a book without any human beings in it whatsoever. — Michel Faber

The skin cells on your nose might well be "potential human beings," in the loose sense in which a rubber ball is a "potential eraser." But a zygote is not a "potential human being" or a "potentially rational animal." Rather, it is an actual human being and thus an actual rational animal, just one that hasn't yet fully realized its inherent potentials. Harris and his ilk might want to ignore the importance of this distinction, but that it is a genuine distinction cannot rationally be denied. — Edward Feser

If human beings are perceived as potentials rather than problems, as possessing strengths instead of weaknesses, as unlimited rather that dull and unresponsive, then they thrive and grow to their capabilities. — Barbara Bush

So, what does all this tell us? First, that the seed of greatness exists in every human being. Whether it sprouts or not is our choice. Second, that there are no such things as natural-born under- or overachievers - there are simply people that tap into their true potentials and people that don't. What is generally recognized as "great talent" is, in almost all cases, nothing more than the outward manifestations of an unwavering dedication to a process. — Sean Patrick

Many people are now starting to experience a new energy filtering down through the density of mass consciousness. This energy stirs your spirit to find freedom of expression and amplifies the voice within your heart. This new planetary energy facilitates people in thinking more about the heart and its potentials in all human affairs. — Doc Childre

Some people today are wandering generalities instead of meaningful specifics because they have failed to discover and mine the wealth of potentials in them. — Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means "to draw out." What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies. Education that builds on our affinity for life would lead to a kind of awakening of possibilities and potentials that lie dormant and unused in the industrial-utilitarian mind. Therefore the task of education, as Dave Forman stated, is to help us 'open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated, planet.' The good news is that our own nature will help us in the process if we let it. — David Orr