Expansion Quotes

“The best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“We only know a tiny proportion about the complexity of the natural world. Wherever you look, there are still things we don’t know about and don’t understand. [...] There are always new things to find out if you go looking for them.”
― David Attenborough

“Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.”
― E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

“What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Human beings have always been an unfinished species, a story in the middle, a succession of families, tribes, and societies in transition to new awarenesses. Although we have always prided ourselves on our willingness to adapt to all habitats, and on our skill at prospering and making ourselves comfortable wherever we are -- in a meadow, in a desert, on the tundra, or out on the ocean -- we don't just adapt to places, or modify them in order to ease our burdens. We're the only species that over and over again has deliberately transformed our surroundings in order to stretch our capacity for understanding and provoke new accomplishments. And our growing and enhanced understanding is our most valuable, and our most vulnerable, inheritance.”
― Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place: A New Way of Looking at and Dealing with our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside

“Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience—that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.”
― Ayn Rand

“Love in this life is expanded by our anticipation of the next life. Those who love under God are never satisfied with small love, or love bound by the flaws of human emotion. Those who love under God dream of another life where they can experience it and live it in God's perfect form, so they seek to build it in this life as much as possible.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“Awkward approximations, dull stammerings which cannot convey my sense of exhilaration as I seem to burst impediments, to exceed bounds of the possible, to experience, in the ruins of the human, the birth of something utterly new.”
― Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

“One keeps looking out for innovation in IPL, but of late it hasn't been all that obvious. Lionel Richie as an opening act? Johnny Mathis must have been busy. Matthew Hayden's Mongoose? Looks a bit like Bob Willis' bat with the "flow-through holes"; Saint Peter batting mitts are surely overdue a revival. The only genuinely intriguing step this year, bringing the IPL to YouTube, was forced on Modi by the collapse of Setanta; otherwise what Modi presents as 'innovation' is merely expansion by another name, in the number of franchises and the number of games.”
― Gideon Haigh

“Sträva efter, utforska och expandera!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live

“What is a human without humanity!
What is a heart without love!
What is a hand that doesn't help!
What is a mind that doesn't expand!
No need to answer. Just think.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mukemmel Musalman: Kafir Biraz, Peygamber Biraz

“You'll never fathom the vastness of my mind, with your puny binary eyes of belief and disbelief - capitalism and socialism - democracy and autocracy - logicality and sentimentality.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iman Insaniyat, Mazhab Muhabbat: Pani, Agua, Water, It's All One

“The grand picture of life lies in the little moments, which the intellectual never finds, nor the superstitious. Grand picture of life dawns upon the life lived grand, It unfolds on its own once you're no more a tribal dunce.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavictor: Kanima Akiyor Kainat

“The woods surge forward without a tree ever taking a step. The forest thrusts itself upward without uttering a sound. And the plants throw their blossoms open in glorious color as nothing more than a natural expression of what they are. And I believe that there are lessons in the woods that would better guide the advance of our lives.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Narrow mind leads to vacant marrow, Without expansion life is hollow.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“Expand, expand, and expand again,
till the world witnesses your human reign.
Expand to serve, expand to love!
Amidst eternal desert be the impossible rain.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets

“My roots are grounded in humanity,
not in one culture or nation.
Cosmos courses through my corpuscles,
My life is a call to expansion.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yaralardan Yangın Doğar: Explorers of Night are Emperors of Dawn

“I am the emperor of time and space,
I am the backbone of human universe.
With my hands I carve civilization,
I am awareness absolute - I am sapiocosmos.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Dervis Vadisi: 100 Promissory Sonnets

“Sonnet 1609

Myself Human,
Himalayan Human -
broader than your schools,
higher than your walls.

Myself Sapiens,
Serendipitous Sapiens -
holier than hagiographies,
stranger than quantum world.

Be a Muslim, be a Christian,
Be an Atheist, or be a martian!
None of these means nothing at all,
till we're each other's emancipation.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yüz Şiirlerin Yüzüğü (Ring of 100 Poems, Bilingual Edition): 100 Turkish Poems with Translations

“You'll never fathom the vastness of my mind, with your puny binary eyes of belief and disbelief - capitalism and socialism - democracy and autocracy - logicality and sentimentality. Or let me put it another way. You can neither fathom nor manifest the true vastness of the human mind, with your puny binary eyes of belief and disbelief - facts and fiction - capitalism and socialism - democracy and autocracy - logicality and sentimentality. To step into the valley of light, you gotta abandon all divide.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iman Insaniyat, Mazhab Muhabbat: Pani, Agua, Water, It's All One

“Learning to work with rather than against our emotional blocks can help our creativity, intuition, and our hearts to expand.”
― Laurie E. Smith

“We can forget how expansive the world is, and how many different possibilities exist for our lives.”
― Laurie E. Smith

“Sometimes our existing relationships need more space so that both parties can grow, expand, and evolve.”
― Laurie E. Smith

“Only by stretching do you grow.
Semper Gumby! "Always Flexible”
― Suzanne Giesemann, The Awakened Way: Making the Shift to a Divinely Guided Life

“Forgetting head, heritage 'n sanity,
I have placed you heartmidst.
I know not much prayer nor poetry;
When heart is frozen, all prayer is amiss.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iman Insaniyat, Mazhab Muhabbat: Pani, Agua, Water, It's All One

“Either you succumb to the world, or expand so vast that the world succumbs to you.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Either you succumb to the world,
or expand so vast that
the world succumbs to you.
Dare past time with your dream defiant,
fabric of reality will unfold through you.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“If your perception doesn't evolve with time, it's not a sign of conviction but cowardice.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Own up your follies, use them
to sharpen your conviction.
Mistakes acknowledged are
the beginning of illumination.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets