Quotes about Potential
“Self-discipline is the key to personal greatness. It is the magic quality that opens all doors for you and makes everything else possible. With self-discipline, the average person can rise as far and as fast as his talents and intelligence can take him. But without self-discipline, a person with every blessing of background, education, and opportunity will seldom rise above mediocrity.”
Brian Tracy, via No Excuses! (Page 7)
“She might have missed those particular opportunities that led her to become an Olympic swimmer, or a traveller, or a vineyard owner, or a rock star, or a planet-saving glaciologist, or a Cambridge graduate, or a mother, or the million other things, but she was still in some way all those people. They were all her. She could have been all those amazing things, and that wasn’t depressing, as she had once thought. Not at all. It was inspiring. Because now she saw the kinds of thing she could do when she put herself to work. And that, actually, the life she had been living had its own logic to it. What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. She didn’t need a vineyard or a California sunset to be happy. She didn’t even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 269)
“She had a fire inside her.
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 164)
She wondered if the fire was to warm her or destroy her.
Then she realized.
A fire had not motive.
Only she could have that.
The power was hers.”
“Exploration of the full range of our own potentialities is not something that we can safely leave to the chances of life. It is something to be pursued systematically, or at least avidly, to the end of our days. We should look forward to an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our potentialities and the claims of life—not only the claims we encounter but the claims we invent. And by potentialities I mean not just skills, but the full range of our capacities for sensing, wondering, learning, understanding, loving and aspiring.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 11)
“The first step to becoming your most powerful self is to literally envision that person. Don’t take yourself out of your current context, either. Begin to ask yourself: What would the most powerful version of me do right now? What would they do with this day? How would they respond to this challenge? How would they move forward? How would they think? What would they feel?”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 184)
“To have a mountain in front of you does not mean you are fundamentally broken in some way. Everything in nature is imperfect, and it is because of that imperfection that growth is possible. If everything existed in uniformity, the gravity that created the stars and planets and everything that we know would not exist. Without breaks, faults, and gaps, nothing could grow and nothing would become. The fact that you are imperfect is not a sign that you have failed; it is a sign that you are human, and more importantly, it is a sign that you still have more potential within you.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 6)