Unused Potential Quotes

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Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and god-like reason to fust in us unused.
William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.” But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art.
Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism is a Humanism)
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
On this subject it is striking to note how many individuals pursue, outside of their own professions and with a kind of rebellious delight, hobbies that are no more than personalized forms of work. This suggests that one of the hidden desires of humanity, provoked by the inward clamor of unused potentialities, is the dream of work in freedom.
Robert Grudin (Time and the Art of Living)
Give out everything you came with. Don’t remain in your comfort zone full of potentials only to die with them unused.
Clement Ogedegbe (YOUR POTENTIALS - THE SOURCE OF YOUR GREATNESS: ….Secrets to unleashing your full potentials and achieving greater heights in life.)
God’s intent for men and women has not changed, nor has He taken from us the strength and beauty He gave us at birth. These gifts are buried within us, covered over by the attitudes and assumptions that prevent us from living the abundant life God planned for us. In effect, many have placed a “No Trespassing” sign over their power, strength, abilities, talents, and capabilities. Because we have obeyed that sign, many of the possibilities with which we were born still exist within us—hidden and dormant, unused and untried.
Myles Munroe (Unlock Your Potential: Becoming Your Best You)
If the hunger for paradise is wired into your heart (and it is), either you will realize that this present life has been designed as a preparation for the paradise to come, or you will do your best and work your hardest to turn the present moment into the paradise it will never be. You and I live in a broken world that right now will not be the paradise we seek. You and I are flawed people, living with flawed people, and collectively we have no ability whatsoever to deliver paradise to one another. Every place you go and every created thing you handle has been damaged by the fall. This simply is not and won’t be the paradise you seek. For all who have placed their trust in the Savior, paradise is a secure reality. The paradise for which your heart longs is coming, but you will not experience it right here, right now. No, God has chosen to keep you in this broken world in order to use its brokenness to prepare you for what is to come. The brokenness you live in the middle of, and the difficulties you face there, are not in the way of God’s good plan for you; they are an important ingredient in it. Right now, God is not so much working to change your surroundings but to change you so that you are ready for the new surroundings he has planned and purchased for you in his grace. Simply said, either you are waiting by faith for the paradise to come, or you are working with your hands to build paradise in the here and now. Looking for paradise in the here and now is another ingredient of the money madness inside many of us and has overtaken the culture around us. We frenetically spend on material things, physical experiences, and new locations in the search of a piece of paradise. Our hearts long for the freedom from external difficulty and internal emptiness that we so often feel. We instinctively know that there must be more, that this can’t be it. Deep within us we feel like we’re missing something. So in our eternity amnesia we don’t lift up our eyes to look afar and consider the glories that are coming. No, we open our wallets and look around at what may have the potential to give us the paradise we are seeking. And because nothing can deliver it, we spend from thing to thing to thing, hoping that the next thing will deliver. But we don’t end up with paradise. We end up with houses that are bigger and more luxurious than we need, cars that are more identity markers than means of transportation, a pile of possessions, many of which lie unused, amassed debt, and wallets that are empty. But the paradise that we’ve spent to get has eluded us. Sure, budgets are helpful, but only if they are a piece of handling our money with eternity in view. When it comes to money, the PMP that lives inside us and that has captured our culture just cannot work. It will cause you to spend too much, it will tempt you to spend unwisely, and for all of your investment, it will leave you empty in the end.
Paul David Tripp (Sex and Money: Pleasures That Leave You Empty and Grace That Satisfies)
Before she could think of what to say, he grasped the axe and turned toward her, his face a mass of angles in the lanternlight. "Step back." This was a man who expected to be heeded. He did not wait to see if she followed his direction before he lifted the axe high above his head. She pressed herself into the corner of the dark room as he attacked the furniture with a vengeance, her surprise making her unable to resist watching him. He was built beautifully. Like a glorious Roman statue, all strong, lean muscles outlined by the crisp linen of his shirtsleeves when he lifted the tool overhead, his hands sliding purposefully along the haft, fingers grasping tightly as he brought the steel blade down into the age-old oak with a mighty thwack, sending a splinter of oak flying across the kitchen, landing atop the long-unused stove. He splayed one long-fingered hand flat on the table, gripping the axe once more to work the blade out of the wood. He turned his head as he stood back, making sure she was out of the way of any potential projectiles- a movement she could not help but find comforting- before confronting the furniture and taking his next swing with a mighty heave. The blade sliced into the oak, but the table held. He shook his head and yanked the axe out once more, this time aiming for one of the remaining table legs. Thwack! Penelope's eyes went wide as the lanternlight caught the way his wool trousers wrapped tightly around his massive thighs. She should not notice... should not be paying attention to such obvious... maleness. But she'd never seen legs like his. Thwack! Never imagined they could be so... compelling. Thwack! Could not help it. Thwack!
Sarah MacLean (A Rogue by Any Other Name (The Rules of Scoundrels, #1))
A confidential report delivered in June 1965 by Abel Aganbegyan, director of the Novobirsk Institute of Economics, highlighted the difficulties. Aganbegyan noted that the growth rate of the Soviet economy was beginning to decline, just as the rival US economy seemed particularly buoyant; at the same time, some sectors of the Soviet economy - housing, agriculture, services, retail trade - remained very backward, and were failing to develop at an adequate rate. The root causes of this poor performance he saw in the enormous commitment of resources to defense (in human terms, 30-40 million people out of a working population of 100 million, he reckoned), and the 'extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters' which had survived from the past. In a complex modern society, he argued, not everything could be planned, since it was impossible to foresee all possible contingencies and their potential effects. So the plan amounted to central command, and even that could not be properly implemented for lack of information and of modern data-processing equipment. 'The Central Statistical Administration ... does not have a single computer, and is not planning to acquire any,' he commented acidly. Economic administration was also impeded by excessive secrecy: 'We obtain many figures... from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration.' Hence the economy suffered from inbuilt distortions: the hoarding of goods and labour to provide for unforeseen contingencies, the production of shoddy goods to fulfill planning targets expressed in crude quantitative terms, the accumulation of unused money by a public reluctant to buy substandard products, with resultant inflation and a flourishing black market.
Geoffrey Hosking (The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within)
One thing that I know for certain is that you are untapped potential. But the one thing that I don’t know for certain is if you’re going to un-tap it. For it you don’t, we will all be the lesser for it. And that I know for certain.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If the world were to stay within the range of carbon emissions that scientists deemed reasonable in order for atmospheric temperatures to remain tolerable through the mid-century, 80 percent of the fossil fuel industry’s reserves would have to stay unused in the ground. In other words, scientists estimated that the fossil fuel industry owned roughly five times more oil, gas, and coal than the planet could safely burn. If the government interfered with the “free market” in order to protect the planet, the potential losses for these companies were catastrophic.
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
by 2008 the arithmetic of climate change presented an almost unimaginable challenge. If the world were to stay within the range of carbon emissions that scientists deemed reasonable in order for atmospheric temperatures to remain tolerable through the mid-century, 80 percent of the fossil fuel industry’s reserves would have to stay unused in the ground. In other words, scientists estimated that the fossil fuel industry owned roughly five times more oil, gas, and coal than the planet could safely burn. If the government interfered with the “free market” in order to protect the planet, the potential losses for these companies were catastrophic. If, however, the carbon from these reserves were burned wantonly without the government applying any brakes, scientists predicted an intolerable rise in atmospheric temperatures, triggering potentially irreversible global damage to life on earth.
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
If she does not run, her thoughts become composted in her head, overheated and overcrowded, potentially fertile but unusable.
Paula Brackston (The Silver Witch)
Man can live in misery, but man can also live in joy. It all depends on how you live, on how you approach life. If one never learns the art of living, life will be a misery. Unless you learn the art of living, you can't have love, silence, joy, awareness, truth and freedom. Everybody comes with an inner potential, but very few people develop that potential. The potential remains unused. One should be more like a flowing river, than a stagnant pond. We have to become flowing, moving into the unknown and always reaching for the ocean. This has been called God, truth, nirvana and enlightenment, but it is really nothing but life blossoming.
Swami Dhyan Giten (Meditation: A Love Affair with the Whole - Thousand and One Flowers of Silence, Love, Joy, Truth, Freedom, Beauty and the Divine)
Modern data infrastructure is necessary but insufficient for a company to become data-driven. A cutting-edge data supply chain that's unused is just as worthless as a nonexistent one. Culture is the key ingredient to ensuring data investments achieve their potential.
Tomasz Tunguz (Winning with Data: Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future)
never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:28). Since he can’t snatch us away, Satan desires to render us completely ineffective and unusable in God’s kingdom, for His plan, and for His glory. We have to keep believing that God can even when He isn’t at the moment. We have to keep believing that God can even when He isn’t at the moment.
Wendy Pope (Hidden Potential: Revealing What God Can Do through You)
But there is something to shake even that one, to shake us all as surely as if the ground beneath our feet began to tremble and break away. Change. In any honest analysis, change is the basis of fear, the idea of something new, of some paradigm that is unfamiliar, that is beyond our experiences so completely that we cannot even truly predict where it will lead us. Change. Uncertainty. It is the very root of our most primal fear—the fear of death—that one change, that one unknown against which we construct elaborate scenarios and “truisms” that may or may not be true at all. These constructions, I think, are an extension of the routines of our lives. We dig ruts with the sameness of our daily paths, and drone and rail against those routines while we, in fact, take comfort in them. We awake and construct our days of habit, and follow the norms we have built fast, solid, and bending only a bit in our daily existence. Change is the unrolled die, the unused sava piece. It is exciting and frightening only when we hold some power over it, only when there is a potential reversal of course, difficult though it may be, within our control. Absent that safety line of real choice, absent that sense of some control, change is merely frightening. Terrifying, even.
R.A. Salvatore (The Orc King (Transitions, #1; The Legend of Drizzt, #20))
But the vital life force that is suppressed and unused doesn’t disappear. It is converted into dark energy and redirected elsewhere. In our world, much of this buried potential is diverted toward mass consumerism and the conspicuous acquisition of material goods. The lords of retail are masters of propaganda, indoctrinating a culture in powerful beliefs (“I am not enough”) and filling people with perpetual desire (“To be worthy, I must acquire x, y, or z”). The outcome of this approach is mass accumulation, exponential waste, skyrocketing debt, and a pervasive feeling of scarcity.
Thomas Hübl (Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds)
Health without progress is potential unused, whereas progress without health is potential abused.
Abhijit Naskar (The Gospel of Technology)
those professionally dedicated to preserving the peace. The tragedy of the diplomatic crisis that preceded the outbreak of the fighting in August 1914, which was to swell into the four-year tragedy of the Great War, is that events successively and progressively overwhelmed the capacity of statesmen and diplomats to control and contain them. Honourable and able men though they were, the servants of the chancelleries and foreign officers of the great powers in the July crisis were bound to the wheel of the written note, the encipherment routine, the telegraph schedule. The potentialities of the telephone, which might have cut across the barriers to communication, seem to have eluded their imaginative powers. The potentialities of radio, available but unused, evaded them altogether. In the event, the states of Europe proceeded, as if in a dead march and a dialogue of the deaf, to the destruction of their continent and its civilisation.
John Keegan (The First World War)