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

“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

“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

“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

“Figure out what works for you as an individual. Then expand within that space. Be yourself. Don't follow what others are doing because it won't come across as natural.”
― Robin S. Baker

“Give energy to what you want to see expand and prosper.”
― Robin S. Baker

“Today's horizon is tomorrow's history.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans

“What is Sapiens (The Sonnet)

Soil can survive without sapiens,
But there is no sapiens without soil.
There is no us if nature goes off the rocker,
Yet way more than nature, we value gas and oil.
We started off using clothes as cover for privacy,
And we ended up prioritizing clothes over integrity.
Instead of loving people and using the products,
We ended up loving products and abusing humanity.
Sapiens is supposed to mean wise and aware,
But in practice, sapiens is code for shallow.
Sapiens has become just a synonym for show-off.
Neither wise, nor aware, sapiens just means narrow.
However, no error is ultimate if we're willing for reform.
An expanding heart is the antidote to all narrow norm.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament

“You are not intended to spend this life squeezed and choked and squashed in a vise of Other People’s design, or values that aren’t your own, or an outdated world view; no, you were made for discernment, cultivation, and expansion.

Until you realize that the internal forces that guide you will evolve as you do, and that you have within you the power to shift and adapt them so that they better meet your needs at various points in your life, trying to exist under the constraints of anything that doesn’t fit will be a significant source of inner conflict. But when you understand that you are free to live by your rules—not those laid down by your partner or family of origin, where you work or where you worship—you also realize that you can rewrite them as needed. You can create a life that is tailor-made.”
― Becky Vollmer, You Are Not Stuck: How Soul-Guided Choices Transform Fear into Freedom

“You have authority over your life. Your life force is expanding. Your potential is limitless. Tap in and prepare yourself to climb the ladder of all that you desire. It is yours to have.”
― Robin S. Baker

“The great beyond lies in the great within.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mukemmel Musalman: Kafir Biraz, Peygamber Biraz

“Thoughts of his future, and eventual death, have altered Jack22's perspective. And as I mentioned before, his intellect is aging rather rapidly. To gain extraordinary knowledge so quickly without personal experience makes his learning incomplete. You don't truly understand the word "burn" until your hand is over the flame.”
― Truant D. Memphis, Post Oh!pocalypto Poppycock

“In Hayek’s monetary theory of the cycle the upswing is generated by monetary expansions that cause an excess of investment over volun- tary saving and a shift in the structure of production toward more time- consuming processes. This structure, created by a depressed money rate of interest, cannot be sustained. Monetary expansion, then, will not pro- duce an everlasting boom, and when the expansion eventually stops, crisis and depression follow. With regard to the sources of monetary expansion, while others like Mises put the blame on the misguided (“inflationist” or “cheap money”) attitude of the monetary authorities, Hayek pointed to the endogenous process of money creation by the banks, in particular in a sys- tem of fractional reserve banking (see, e.g., Hayek 2012a [1933a], chap. 4, vs. Mises 2006b [1928]).”
― Bruce Caldwell, Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950

“Endeavor, explore and expand!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live

“building for scale that you don't need is a waste of effort and may lock you into an inflexible design.”
― Martin Kleppmann, Designing Data-Intensive Applications

“There are forces that have always attempted, and ultimately failed, to make America static and rigid. But America has proven to be elastic. Our ancestors have always had to push and stretch America to accommodate its many residents and communities. We now have to do our part.

If any of you have been active students of US history, you know that with every two steps we march forward toward progress, we always get pushed one step back. The racially anxious men and women with hoods, tiki torches, and business suits will do everything in their power to violently chokehold and drag America back to 1953. This is the year before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. I'm convinced that 1953 is also the year that many enemies of diversity and progress believe America was allegedly "great.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“When the body's all 114 chakras are in balance, grace, beauty, light, joy, and expansion arise.”
― Amit Ray, Ray 114 Chakra System Names, Locations and Functions

“Eyes on ambition,
feet on the ground.
Hands on heart,
and mind unbound.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yarasistan: My Wounds, My Crown

“But, please, I beg of you,
Don't turn me into yet another
spiritual guru imported from the East.
Don't be a second-hand Naskar -
Expand to such an extent,
that even Naskar turns obsolete.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World

“everything widens and withers,
opens and closes,
expands and contracts—
like a tulip
like an ice cream shop
like a heart.”
― Jenny Noble Anderson, But Still She Flies: Poems and Paintings

“Sensuality is a deepest form of understanding. It’s the ability to connect with someone at any level of depth so that you can understand their needs, desires, challenges and motivations. That’s why I keep urging people to become totally devoted to the limitless expansion of their sensuality. That’s how you become omniscient.”
― Lebo Grand

“Sensuality is the deepest form of understanding. It’s the ability to connect with someone at any level of depth so that you can understand their needs, desires, challenges and motivations. That’s why I keep urging people to become totally devoted to the limitless expansion of their sensuality. That’s how you become omniscient.”
― Lebo Grand

“Expand, expand, and expand again,
There is no end to expansion.
And never ever let your love for me
stifle your rightful progression.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“Verb Over Noun (The Sonnet)

I do the best of my writing,
When I don't feel like a writer.
I create the best of my philosophy,
When I don't feel like a philosopher.
I write the best of my poetry,
When I don't deem myself a poet.
I publish the best of my science,
Walking just a pilgrim of knowledge.
Labels we hold dear often hold us captive,
So do not take the acronym for the act.
Designations can't contain the designated,
Move past the noun and let the verb enact.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavictor: Kanima Akiyor Kainat