limits Quotes

“There are roads which must not be followed, armies which must not be attacked, towns which must not be besieged, positions which must not be contested, commands of the sovereign which must not be obeyed.”

“You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing, and you’re terrified somebody’s gonna stick you in a cage--well, baby you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it’s not bounded in the West by Tulip, Texas, or on the East by Somaliland--it’s wherever you go, because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”

″We might think, as we become more open, that it’s going to take bigger catastrophes for us to reach our limit. The interesting thing is that, as we open more and more, it’s the big ones that immediately wake us up and the little things that catch us off guard. However, no matter what the size, color, or shape is, the point is still to lean toward the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than to protect ourselves from it.″

“Shame is the emotion which gives us permission to be human. Shame tells us of our limits. Shame keeps us in our human boundaries, letting us know we can and will make mistakes, and that we need help.”

“My brother and I became seriously interested in the problem of human flight in 1899 ... We knew that men had by common consent adopted human flight as the standard of impossibility. When a man said, “It can’t be done; a man might as well try to fly,” he was understood as expressing the final limit of impossibility.”

“His body is a paradox of mass and lightness, crafted to slip through air with the ease of an arrow. His mind is impressed with a single command: run. He pursues speed with superlative courage, pushing beyond defeat, beyond exhaustion, sometimes beyond the structural limits of bone and sinew. In flight, he is nature’s ultimate wedding of form and purpose.”

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole.”

“Our problem as Americans -- at least, among my race and gender -- is that we resist the very idea of limits, regarding limits of all sorts as temporary and regrettable impositions on our lives.”

“We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.”

“My feelings of love may be unbounded, but my capacity to be loving is limited. I therefore must choose the person on whom to focus my capacity to love, toward whom to direct my will to love. True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.”

“Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way [...] fifty miles at the very limits of conception. ”

“You don’t have to test everything to destruction just to see if you made it right.”

“People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past.”

“We didn’t really like to wear the veil, especially since we didn’t understand why we had to.”

“He well knew why He did, and what He meant. For in that fairest chain of love He bound Fire and air and water and the ground Of earth in certain limits they may not flee.”

“You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.”

“I can understand how the limited perspective of an unartificial mind might perceive it that way. You’ll get used to it.”

“If you limit your choice only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.”

“When we reach the limits of our own strength, and courage, something unexpected happens. We find reinforcement coming from a source outside of ourselves. And in the knowledge that we are not alone, that God is on our side, we manage to go on.”

“The only thought to liberate the mind is that which leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of its impending end.”

“You can’t stop animals from running away! They’re frightened. They don’t want to be killed and eaten!”

“It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his performances.”

“From the neck down, very few people are worth more than a few hundred dollars a week. From the neck up, there is no limit to what an individual is worth.”

“Within certain limits, bad thought and bad morals can be good literature. If so great a man as Tolstoy could not demonstrate the contrary, I doubt whether anyone else can either.”

“You’ll never find your limits until you’ve gone too far.”

“Physical fitness determines where the wall that represents your physical limit is placed. Mental fitness determines how close you are able to get to that limit in competition.”

“You always have the power of choice, even when those choices seem limited.”

“I gave myself three more seconds to look at him, and it’s like another punch to the gut. He’s my person. He’s always been my person. My best friend, my confidant, probably the love of my life. And I’ve spent the last eleven years being angry and self-righteous. But at the end of the day, he tore a hole in us, and fate ripped it wide open.”