A Quote by Samuel Smiles

An intense anticipation itself transforms possibility into reality; our desires being often but precursors of the things which we are capable of performing.

Samuel Smiles

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Anticipation Being Capable Desires Intense Itself Often Our Performing Possibility Reality Things Which

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Samuel Smiles
Scottish - Author
December 23, 1812 - April 16, 1904

Our desires presage the capacities within us; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is indeed possible into dreamt-for reality.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.

Michel de Montaigne

No reality transforms itself.

Paulo Freire

Humility is often only the putting on of a submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a morecalculated sort of pride, which debases itself with a design of being exalted; and though this vice transform itself into a thousand several shapes, yet the disguise is never more effectual nor more capable of deceiving the world than when concealed under a form of humility.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Good works are often spoiled by moving too quickly. . . . The good which God desires is accomplished almost by itself, without our even thinking of it.

Vincent de Paul

What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality. It may sound paradoxical, but it is in fact reality which forms the mystery of our existence.

Max Beckmann

I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don't in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do.

Francis Bacon

In meditation and/or intense life interfaces, our personal view is often superseded by Self's, causing our apparent reality and all of it's limitations to disappear.

James R. Swartz

The universe is an infinite opportunity creation machine. In every instant, the possibility of greater possibility is programmed into the nature of things. Love creates the conduit through which new possibility enters our experience, and lovelessness keeps it at bay.

Marianne Williamson

For those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality.

Mircea Eliade

Surely the memory of an event cannot pass for the event itself. Nor can the anticipation. There is something exceptional, unique, about the present event, which the previous, or the coming do not have. There is livingness about it, an actuality; it stands out as if illumined. There is the "stamp of reality" on the actual, which the past and future do not have.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Being able to recognize which of your desires are vital to pursue and which ones are not is often less than easy. This is precisely why the ancient sages counseled that we practice yoga. Their point was a very practical one: You are best able to discern which of your many desires should (and should not) be responded to when your mind is calm and tranquil.

Rod Stryker

The possibility of observing the developments of the psychical life of the child as natural phenomena and experimental reactions transforms the school itself in action into a kind of scientific laboratory for the psychogenetic study of man.

Maria Montessori

Doubtless almost any intense emotion may open our 'inward eye' to the beauty of reality. Falling in love appears to do it for some people. The beauties of nature or the exhilaration of artistic creation does it for others. Probably any high experience may momentarily stretch our souls up on tiptoe, so that we catch a glimpse of that marvelous beauty which is always there, but which we are not often tall enough to perceive.

Margaret Prescott Montague

In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." -- Essay: "Kafka and his Precursors

Jorge Luis Borges

We want our children to become who they are- and a developed person is, above all, free. But freedom as we define it doesn't mean doing what you want. Freedom means the ability to make choices that are good for you. It is the power to choose to become what you are capable of becoming, to develop your unique potential by making choices that turn possibility into reality. It is the ability to make choices that actualize you. As often as not, maybe more often than not, this kind of freedom means doing what you do not want, doing what is uncomfortable or tiring or boring or annoying

Gregory Millman

A Quote by Samuel Smiles

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