Lost Potential Quotes & Sayings

When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world, and so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope. — Mohsin Hamid

Barrie wanted to fall into him, her lost to his found, her need to his want. Kissing was like the physical form of magic, all potential and the sense that anything might happen. When she was kissing Eight, she felt like she could fly. — Martina Boone

Surviving a loss and letting go is only half of the story. The other half is the secret belief that we will find, in one form or another, what we have lost. And it is that potential, shimmery as a star on a clear night that helps us survives. — Veronica Chambers

Crist noted that his office has received multiple fraud complaints in which potential buyers said they lost thousands of dollars. I don't know if we've seen anything of this exact nature before, .. We won't tolerate it. — Charlie Crist

Newborn children represent perfection and the state of being to which each of us is duty-bound to return. In the instant after you were born, you were fearless, pure love, innocent, infinitely wise, of boundless potential and beautifully connected with the unseen hand that created the universe. Most of us on the planet today have lost this connection to our authentic selves, this original state of being in which we were unafraid to walk toward possibility and reach for the stars. We have forgotten who we are. — Robin S. Sharma

Part of the problem with the word 'disabilities' is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities. — Fred Rogers

To be born means being compelled to choose an era, a place, a life. To exist here, now, means to lost the possibility of being countless other potential selves.. Yet once being born there is no turning back. And I think that's exactly why the fantasy worlds of cartoon movies so strongly represent our hopes and yearnings. They illustrate a world of lost possibilities for us. — Hayao Miyazaki

All Christian preachers have to face this issue. Either we preach that human beings are rebels against God, under his just judgment and (if left to themselves) lost, and that Christ crucified who bore their sin and curse is the only available Saviour. Or we emphasize human potential and human ability, with Christ brought in only to boost them, and with no necessity for the cross except to exhibit God's love and so inspire us to greater endeavour. The former is the way to be faithful, the latter the way to be popular. It is not possible to be faithful and popular simultaneously. — John R.W. Stott

I saw you
Wandering
Like a lily in a meadow
Afraid
Of your secret potential
I knew
Who you were
And
Who I was.
Your eyes
As green as the grass
We laid in,
Your hair
As orange as the butterflies
We created.
We shared secrets
Of powers
Of mysteries
Until we'd see each other
Soon
But we split and
You fell hard for a
Buck.
I was
Like a doe in the headlights
I loved you, but
I lost you this time
Forever
But not for
Always. — J.K. Rowling

Mappo frowned. 'I have not heard that phrase before. Lost Elementals?'
'Scholars tend to acknowledge but four, generally: water, fire, earth and air; yet others exist. ( ... ) Life, death, dark, light, shadow ... possibly, but even that seems a truncated selection. What of, for example, time? Past, present, future? What of desire, and deed? Sound, silence? Or are the latter two but minor aspects of air? Does time belong to light? Or is it but a point somewhere between light and dark, yet distinct from shadow? What of faith and denial? Can you now understand, Mappo, the potential complexity of relationships?'
'Assuming they exist at all, beyond the notion of concepts.'
'Granted. Yet, maybe concepts are all that's needed, if the purpose of the elements is to give shape and meaning to all that surrounds us on the outside, and all that guides us from within. — Steven Erikson

The lucid, rational part of Billie wanted to laugh. Here she was, out in the woods of middle-class suburbia, with a man's fingers inside her panties, inside her, a climax of unimaginable force trembling at the edge of her grasp. And the man who now plied her and played her ... a prostitute. A gigolo. A beloved brother and son and uncle, and a suspect, with too many secrets and too much sexual prowess.
A man she was falling in love with.
The impossibility of it, the crazy, twisted potential swept over her, then ebbed, lost in the surge of unbelievable pleasure that built and built within her like strings drawn too tightly across a fine-tuned instrument. She would die from this, die and scatter into a million fragments and drift like dust on the wind. — Shelby Reed

Here's a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost. — Satoshi Kanazawa

The tragedy of Tupac is that his untimely passing is representative of too many young black men in this country....If we had lost Oprah Winfrey at 25, we would have lost a relatively unknown, local market TV anchorwoman. If we had lost Malcolm X at 25, we would have lost a hustler named Detroit Red. And if I had left the world at 25, we would have lost a big-band trumpet player and aspiring composer--just a sliver of my eventual life potential. — Quincy Jones

life is to us. A lesson lost in the depths of time and ignorance. A lesson, that all of us can rise to be better people. A lesson, that there exists a potential god in every single human being. All we have to do is listen to ourselves. The Immortals of Meluha is the first book in the trilogy that chronicles the journey of this extraordinary hero. Two more books are to follow: The Secret of the Nagas — Amish Tripathi

Being the church that Jesus intended means that we must participate in God's eternal purposes for his world. Renewal means more than reinventing ourselves; it means rediscovering the primal power of the Spirit and the gospel already present in the life of the church - reconnecting with this purpose and recovering the forgotten ways. This purpose and potential have always been there, but individuals and communities have largely lost touch with them. — Alan Hirsch

Besides that, Sebastian liked books - all kinds. He loved fiction, non-fiction, big picture art books, the smell, the feel, and the potential to sit down with a book, become lost within it and only surface hours later when you needed to pee. Books were the bestest of best friends - and they never bitched if you forgot their birthdays or decided not to call them for a month. — Amy Lane

When nearly a third of our high school students do not graduate on time with their peers, we have work to do. We must design our middle and high schools so that no student gets lost in the crowd and disconnected from his or her own potential. — Christine Gregoire

From the beginning, man could look up at a vast universe dotted by innumerable stars to find every evidence that he was nothing. This evidence only grows stronger as science and technology record an expanse of galaxies filled with planetary solar systems beyond any visible end. Man is but a grain of sand lost on an endless seashore, and yet he believes with conviction in his own greatness. He is either a divine soul intuitively aware of his inherent, limitless potential - or he is a blind fool. — Richelle E. Goodrich

There is potential for boundless good in the boy I knew. Trust that the man you see now is a shadow of what lies beneath. If you would, give him the love that will enable him to see it for himself. To a lost soul, such a treasure is worth its weight in gold. Worth its weight in dreams. — Renee Ahdieh

No one's a lost cause. You have just as much potential as anyone else. — Jody Hedlund

President Obama was right to ban torture, but the public must understand that this decision carries a potential cost in lost information. That's what makes it a moral choice. — David Ignatius

God makes it clear that his image bearers must live in dynamic communion with one another, thereby discovering and celebrating the good gift of one's own gender and that of the other. With a cross-shaped lens, we behold the beauty of man for woman and woman for man. None of us has ever lost that original design. No matter how broken we have become, we have never lost the potential to be good gifts for others! — Andrew Comiskey

Ricky asks her, "You lost your earrings in the living room?" She shakes her head. "No, I lost them in the bedroom. But the light out here is much better." And there it is. Most leaders prefer to look for answers where the light is better, where they are more comfortable. And the light is certainly better in the measurable, objective, and data-driven world of organizational intelligence (the smart side of the equation) than it is in the messier, more unpredictable world of organizational health. Studying spreadsheets and Gantt charts and financial statements is relatively safe and predictable, which most executives prefer. That's how they've been trained, and that's where they're comfortable. What they usually want to avoid at all costs are subjective conversations that can easily become emotional and awkward. And organizational health is certainly fraught with the potential for subjective and awkward conversations. — Patrick Lencioni

Let us become the first generation to decide to be the last that sees empty classrooms, lost childhoods and wasted potential — Malala Yousafzai

Thinking about the bacon - the potential of bacon - gives me hope. Not all is lost if bacon isn't. — Rick Yancey

The delicate balance between these factors helps explain why, for instance, the typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect. It may not seem as though she should. The architect would appear to
be more skilled (as the word is usually defined) and better educated (again, as usually defined). But little girls don't grow up dreaming of becoming prostitutes, so the supply of potential prostitutes is relatively small. Their skills, while not necessarily "specialized," are practiced in a very specialized context. The job is unpleasant and forbidding in at least two significant ways: the likelihood of violence and the lost opportunity of having a stable family life. As for demand? Let's just say that an architect is more likely to hire a prostitute than vice versa. — Levitt And Dubner

Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? ... a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? — Abraham Maslow

When I saw Paul Scofield do 'Love's Labor's Lost at Stratford,' that's when I saw the potential of the level of truth that could go on up there on a stage. I said, 'This is what I want to do.' — Michael Moriarty

The key question isn't "What fosters creativity?" But why in God's name isn't everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might not be why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate?
We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle that anybody created anything. — Abraham H. Maslow

It took the United States until 1920 to give women the franchise and another 40 or 50 years to start utilizing women's potential. How many women of incredible potential did we fail and what achievements were lost to all because we never tapped that potential? — James E. Rogers

Imagine considering every moment as a potential time of communion with God. By the time your life is over, you will have spent six months at stoplights, eight months opening junk mail, a year and a half looking for lost stuff (double that number in my case), and a whopping five years standing in various lines.7Why don't you give these moments to God? By giving God your whispering thoughts, the common becomes uncommon. Simple phrases such as "Thank you, Father," "Be sovereign in this hour, O Lord," "You are my resting place, Jesus" can turn a commute into a pilgrimage. You needn't leave your office or kneel in your kitchen. Just pray where you are. Let the kitchen become a cathedral or the classroom a chapel. Give God your whispering thoughts. — Max Lucado

There is redemption in sadness. It tells me that for nearly five months in 2003, I lived life with the open, raw, refreshing outlook of the young. The payoff, though difficult to quantify, is much greater than I expected. I have no regrets about having gone -- it was the right thing to do. I think about it every day. Sometimes I can hardly believe it happened. I just quit -- and I was on a monumental trip. I didn't suffer financial ruin, my wife didn't leave me, the world didn't stop spinning. I do think of how regrettable it would have been had I ignored the pull that I felt to hike the trail. A wealth of memories could have been lost before they had even occurred if I had dismissed as a whim my inkling to hike. It is disturbing how tenuous our potential is due to our fervent defense of the comfortable norm. — David Miller

What was lost in the European cataclysm was not only the Jewish past
the whole life of a civilization
but also a major share ofthe Jewish future ... [ellipsis in source] It was not only the intellect of a people in its prime that was excised, but the treasure of a people in its potential. — Cynthia Ozick

As the sun rose over Washington, Langdon looked to the heavens, where the last of the nighttime stars were fading out. He thought about science, about faith, about man. He thought about how every culture, in every country, in every time, had always shared one thing. We all had the Creator. We use different names, different faces, and different prayers, but God was the universal constant for man. God was the symbol we all shared ... the symbol of all the mysteries of life that we could not understand. The ancients had praised God as a symbol of our limitless human potential, but that ancient symbol had been lost over time. Until now. — Dan Brown

For me, a book held the potential to change my life, at least for the moments lost between the pages. — Claire Ashby

As it turns out, that feeling of being lost or listless or never achieving your potential doesn't contain itself within any certain decade of life; it just lives in you until you learn how to cope with it or let it go. — Hannah Hart

We must realize that we are all, like Dr. Faust, ready to accept the devil's inducements. The devil is in each one of us in the form of an ego that promises the fulfillment of desire on condition that we become subservient to its striving to dominate. The domination of the personality by the ego is a diabolical perversion of the nature of man. The ego was never intended to be the master of the body, but its loyal and obedient servant. The body, as opposed to the ego, desires pleasure, not power. Bodily pleasure is the source from which all our good feelings and good thinking stems. If the bodily pleasure of an individual is destroyed, he becomes an angry, frustrated, and hateful person. His thinking becomes distorted, and his creative potential is lost. He develops self-destructive attitudes. — Alexander Lowen

The potential for loss of soul
to one degree or another
is the affliction of a society that as a collective has lost its sense of the holy, of a culture that values everything else above the spiritual. We live in such a spiritually impoverished culture
and in such a time. Loss of soul, to one degree or another, is a constant teasing possibility. We are invited at every corner to hedge on the truth, indulge outselves, act as if our words and actions have no ultimate consequence, make an absolute of the material world, and treat the spiritual world as if it were some kind of frothy, angelic fantasy. In such a world the soul struggles for survival; in such a world a man can lose his own soul and have the whole culture support him, and in such a world, conversely, the light of a single, great soul that lives in integrity can truly illumine the world. — Daphne Rose Kingma

Most humans, in varying degrees, are already dead. In one way or another they have lost their dreams, their ambitions, their desire for a better life. They have surrendered their fight for self-esteem and they have compromised their great potential. They have settled for a life of mediocrity, days of despair and nights of tears. They are no more than living deaths confined to cemeteries of their choice. Yet they need not remain in that state. They can be resurrected from their sorry condition. They can each perform the greatest miracle in the world. They can each come back from the dead ... — Og Mandino

I've noticed most people are at their best during the day, in the light. Night fascinates you with its mystery and potential, but it's ominous too because things are easily hidden or lost in the dark, especially control. Most species I've encountered are powerless there. No matter where that dark is - inside or out - you are all at its mercy. It's harder to lose things and easier to find them, including yourself, in the light. — Jonathan Carroll

To me, summer has always been about potential. This was especially true when I was in high school. Those 3 or so months between 1 school year and the next always meant change. People got taller or wider or smaller. They broke up or came together, lost friends or gained them, had life experiences that you could tell had transformed them even if you didn't know what they were. In the summer, the days were long, stretching into each other. Out of school, everything was on pause and yet happening at the same time, this collection of weeks when anything was possible. As a teenager, I was always hoping to change, to become someone other than who I was. Each summer, I felt I had the chance to do that. All I had to do was wait and see what happened. — Sarah Dessen

If your potential mate does not have the same perspective that you do then you're going to be lost. — Eva LaRue

Let it not be said by a future, forlorn generation that we wasted and lost our great potential because our despair was so deep we didn't even try, or because each of us thought someone else was worrying about our problems. — Ralph Nader

Its hard to say what was happening inside her head. Her brain doesn't function quite like most people's to begin with and maybe, under a lot of stress, she just lost the ability to hope.
Dev pondered this, hope as an ability.
I guess that's what's so hard for me to get to, the no hope. To think that, of all the potential scenarios out there, there's not a single good one? It just seems like we- as human beings- know so much, but its nothing compared to what we don't know. The universe surprises us, right? That's just what it does. So how could she be so one hundred percent positive that nothing good would happen? — Marisa De Los Santos

Life has ceased to be lived in a closed world the center of which was man; the world has become limitless and the same time threatening. By losing his fixed place in a closed world man loses the answer to the meaning of his life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life. He is threatened by powerful superpersonal forces, capital and the market. His relationship to his fellow men, with everyone a potential competitor, has become hostile and estranged; he is free - that is, he is alone, isolated, threatened from all sides. [H]e is overwhelmed with a sense of his individual nothingness and helplessness. Paradise is lost for good, the individual stands alone and faces the world - a stranger thrown into a limitless and threatening world. The new freedom is bound to create a deep feeling of insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety. — Erich Fromm

I have known a lot of people in my life, and I can tell you this ... Some of the ones who understood love better than anyone else were those who the rest of the world had long before measured as lost or gone. Some of the people who were able to look at the dirtiest, the poorest, the gays, the straights, the drug users, those in recovery, the basest of sinners, and those who were just ... plain ... different.
They were able to look at them all and only see strength. Beauty. Potential. Hope.
And if we boil it down, isn't that what love actually is? — Dan Pearce

He prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world. — Mohsin Hamid

All of us started normal. All of us started out as functioning human beings with the potential to do almost anything we wanted, but somewhere along the paths of our lives, we got lost. — James Frey

I think the world sort of looks to the kids who have potential. These are the kids who are going to do something with their lives, who are going to do something for the world. I don't think it's malicious, but the other kids get lost from that point on. — Matt De La Pena

You are a fine and talented woman, whose potential is yet to be realized given the love and support and luck we all need. Where you lost the will to fight for what is yours, where you gave away control of your life, is the mystery you are now unraveling. When you get it all back, hold on to it. — Isabel Vincent

For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past/ ... /, wherein nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. — Viktor E. Frankl

You don't want to just get by, you want to get ahead. You don't want to settle for mediocrity, you want to strive for greatness. You don't want to get lost in the crowd, you want to stand out and lead the charge. Pushing the limits of your potential isn't easy, but it will be worth it. — Michael J. Schiemer

The room had lost its morning light, the glow of expectation and potential. The daylight was now gray, and the new day was already used, a little soiled by mistaken thoughts and makeshift undertakings. — Tove Jansson

The expense of making yourself panicked, enraged, and self-pitying is enormous. In time and money lost. In needless effort spent. In uncalled-for mental anguish. In sabotaging others' happiness. In foolishly frittering away potential joy during the one life - yes, the one life - you'll probably ever have. — Albert Ellis

If I hadn't lost my hearing, I wouldn't be where I am now. It forced me to maximize my own potential. I have to be better than the average person to succeed. — Lou Ferrigno

I would just have to find a hog, slaughter it, butcher it, cure the meat, then fry it up. Thinking about the bacon - the potential of bacon - gives me hope. Not all is lost if bacon isn't. Seriously. — Rick Yancey

She smiled thoughtfully. "I think Jackson was like a lost puppy. He needed purpose, someone to believe in him and love him despite his bullshit. But he didn't have that, so he just went around humping everyone's leg and peeing everywhere. Then you came along and he thought he found that owner that would give him that purpose - something that would make him feel needed - but you chose the fancy pet store puppy instead, so he went back to peeing on everything and destroying all the furniture."
"Um, Whit ... is there a point to this?"
"We all need someone to believe in us. It helps us see our full potential. You were that someone to believe in him. I think he'll be a new man because of it."
"So you're saying I rescued a lost puppy, and now he'll become a topnotch show dog because I'm just so amazing?"
"Exactly."
"You have such an eloquent way with words."
"No shit, right?"
"Precisely."
-Emma and Whitney — Rachael Wade

But he was wise enough even at twenty to see that what many would call an utter and admirable freedom was also a sort of thicket or wilderness, in which, by virtue of being able to take any path he chose, he was lost in a dense jungle of the possible, the sheer welter of which sometimes overwhelmed him. The irony was, he thought, that as soon as you chose a path, you mourned and regretted the ones that you did not choose; but to choose none was to moon uselessly over them all, and thus be imprisoned by impasse. How very many people, he thought as he walked through the catchbirdtrees by the lake, were frozen by the weight of their potential, the imposing alps of their dreams? — Brian Doyle

The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. I couldn't yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out. — Hanif Kureishi

The Hoodmen are far from being the worst of the servants of the Cult of the Unwritten Book, but they are among the most peculiar. You know when you're trying to remember a word and it's on the tip of your tongue but you can't seem to get it out? Well, that's because the Hoodmen have eaten it. They eat all the words that are on the tips of other people's tongues. They thrive on misplaced words, savoring all the lost potential of each expression. They're also able to convert words into electricity. Mr. Steele took an entire phrase. — Grant Morrison

You are the male I might have been. You are the potential I had and lost. You are the honor and the strength and the kindness she needs. You'll take care of her. I want you to take care of her. — J.R. Ward

I have a rule of thumb now and that's that somebody [she dates] has to have been married and they have to have had kids. Everything boils down to perspective. If your potential mate does not have the same perspective that you do then you're going to be lost ... If somebody has never been married, they don't know compromise ... [and] if they don't have children, they don't know the absolute self-sacrifice it takes and what it means to be a parent. — Eva LaRue

Celaena Sardothien wasn't in league with Aelin Ashryver Galathynius.
Celaena Sardothien was Aelin Ashryver Galathynius, heir to the throne and rightful Queen of Terranes.
Celaena was Aelin Galathynius, the greatest living threat to Adarlan, the one person who could raise an army capable of standing against the king. Now, she was also the one person who knew the secret source of the king's power - and who sought a way to destroy it.
And he had just sent her into the arms of her strongest potential allies: to the homeland of her mother, the kingdom of her cousin, and the domain of her aunt, Queen Maeve of the Fae.
Celaena was the lost Queen of Terrasen.
Chaol sank to his knees. — Sarah J. Maas

The journey to true happiness and to happiness now is not a journey of physical distance or time; it is one of personal "self-recovery," where we remember and reconnect consciously to an inner potential for joy
a paradise lost
waiting to be found. — Robert Holden

All that can best be expressed in words should be expressed in verse, but verse is a slow thing to create; nay, it is not really created: it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty and of desire that has lain long, potential and unexpressed, in the mind of the man who secretes it. God knows that this Unknown Country has been hit off in verse a hundred times...

Milton does it so well in the Fourth Book of Paradise Lost that I defy any man of a sane understanding to read the whole of that book before going to bed and not to wake up next morning as though he had been on a journey. — Hilaire Belloc