Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Human Potential
"Stars wishing upon the potential of humans shine faithfully on." Aberjhani
Editor's Essay: Part I: Human Potential, "no discoverable upper limit"
Editor's Essay: Part II: Human Potential, a godlike ability to rise above
Editor's Essay: Father Chardin: Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
Editor's Essay: Higher Creativity: Liberating The Unconscious For Breakthrough Insights
Editor’s Essay: After 30 years of investigation, here’s what I’ve found as the most convincing evidence for post-mortem survival.
Editor’s Essay: What does it mean to be a great man or woman?
Editor's Essay: How did the ancient Greeks, a religious people, manage, almost single-handedly, to create what we call philosophy? Why is it that the beginnings of so many important modern fields of enquiry find their roots in the ancient Hellenic culture?
Cavalin, the ten-year old college student with an A+ average

Frederic W. H. Myers, in the afterlife, transmitted to Juliet S. Goodenow, Vanishing Night: “You [shall] find whatever you search after. In all the category of experience, you gain what you are searching after — in literature, in art, knowledge, science, invention, love-attainment, in culture, wisdom, riches or treasure… All is accorded you. The spiritual embodiment of your life work is your treasure in Heaven, those laid up by yourself [that is, what you have made of yourself, reflecting your particular talents], your treasures, your mansion, your reward for all you have done on the Earth Plane is laid up by yourself, for yourself, when at last you attain your reward for deeds done in the body. No arbitrary avenging angel awaits you. Creation afforded you in the beginning the implements of industrious labor to satisfy the craving of hunger of the body, and for the satisfaction of the soul. Within your complex organism the Creator placed a guide [that is, your particular desire and sentiment, which reveal destiny] — your passport through the world and through eternity.”
Winston Churchill: “Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
Charles Schulz: “There is no heavier burden than an unfulfilled potential.”
Marilyn Ferguson: “Your past is not your potential. In any hour you can choose to liberate the future.”

William Faulkner: “Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
Roy T. Bennett: “Believe in your infinite potential. Your only limitations are those you set upon yourself.”
John O'Donohue: “Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The eternal makes you urgent. You are loath to let compromise or the threat of danger hold you back from striving toward the summit of fulfillment.”
William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is -- infinite.”
Rainer Maria Rilke: “Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
Og Mandino, The Greatest Miracle in World: “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...”
Confucius: “A youth is to be regarded with respect. How do we know that his future will not be equal to our present?”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet: “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.”
James E. Faust: “It is a denial of the divinity within us to doubt our potential and our possibilities.”
Elna Baker, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir: “Impossible is Nothing,” it said. “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson: “…there is no planet, sun, or star could hold you if you but knew what you are.”
Robert Murray McCheyne: “The seed of every sin known to man is in my heart.”
Rishank Jhavar, Champion's Handbook: Meteoric Guide for Meteoric Success: “(Your) potential doesn’t mean **** if you don’t get off your *** and start working.”
Charles Bukowski: “I'm one of those who doesn't think there is much difference between an atomic scientist and a man who cleans the crappers except for the luck of the draw - parents with enough money to point you toward a more generous death; of course, some come through brilliantly, but there are thousands, millions of others, bottled up, kept from even the most minute chance to realize their potential.”
Jennifer DeLucy: “All that you have been is but a small part, a very mere bit of the potential of your life.”
Mehmet Murat ildan: “Whenever a child is born, a potential power that may consciously change the universe is born!”
Sunday Adelaja: “If a person refuses to develop his potential, it can lead to nervous or mental disorders, somatic diseases and personal degradation”
Gugu Mona: “Never underestimate the power within you, because you may be the only person in the entire universe to solve a specific problem.”
Lailah Gifty Akita: “What you do with ease is your passion.”
White Eagle: “Flowers do not force their way with great strife. Flowers open to perfection slowly in the sun. Don’t be in a hurry about spiritual matters. Go step by step and be very sure.”
Christian D. Larson: “Believe in yourself and all that you are. Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle [or mountain].”
William James: “Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, ‘This is the real me’, and when you have found that attitude, follow it.”
Samuel Butler: “Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.”
Byron and Catherine Pulsifer, Leadership vs. Management: "By attempting to manage people you are limiting their potential."
Patrick King: "We don't all have the potential to be world-class athletes, but we all possess a certain amount of potential and innate ability that differentiates us from everyone else in the world."
Calvin Coolidge: "The most common commodity in this country is unrealized potential."
Robert Browning: “Our aspirations are our possibilities.”
Thomas S. Monson: "In the private sanctuary of one's own conscience lies that spirit, that determination to cast off the old person and to measure up to the stature of true potential."
Life In Two Spheres, or Scenes in the Summerland, by Hudson Tuttle, channeled testimony from the other side:
"Wretch! Wretch! Wretch,” he exclaimed in anguish."Oh, that I had never been born!”
The Sage, taking him by the hand, raised him up, saying: "Self-accusing child, why blame yourself thus? Blame no one for their follies, but the circumstances in which you were placed. They were bad; popular opinion, before which you bent , was bad. All tended to make you what you were. You have a germ of native goodness in your being, or you would not thus accuse yourself. Arise! weep no more! The future is bright.” ...
"You have corrected me aright; I acknowledge your superior spiritual powers of perception reverentially."
"Reverence not me; I am no more than the others. We acknowledge submission to no one. Each is his own individual sovereign, to think and act as best pleases himself, if he is regardful of the rights of others and is measured by his worth alone. If you are thankful express it, not by words or gestures, but by actions. Reverence not me, but truth. You are still prejudiced on this and kindred subjects, and your prejudice must be overcome."
Ralph Waldo Emerson: “There are many who are living far below their possibilities because they are continually handing over their individualities to others. Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be yourself. Be true to the highest within your soul and then allow yourself to be governed by no customs or conventionalities or arbitrary man-made rules that are not founded on principle.”
Mary Daly: "It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God"
Orison Swett Marden: “Deep within man dwell those slumbering powers; powers that would astonish him, that he never dreamed of possessing; forces that would revolutionize his life if aroused and put into action.”
Albert Camus: “In the depth of winter I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
Ernest Hemingway: “Man is not made for defeat.”
William James: “If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.”
Lou Holtz: “I can't believe that God put us on this earth to be ordinary.”
Aberjhani: "Stars wishing upon the potential of humans shine faithfully on."
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