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

“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

“If we would, hypothetically, explore the idea of the universe's contraction, the result would be similar to the black hole. Regardless of a much bigger mass of the whole Universe, as ours is, the absolute contraction would lead to the same point at which the black hole reaches maximum density. The point of maximum density is Zero, at which point the Big Bang happens (or the Universe disappears, which is less likely). In this sense, from the point of the result, expansion or contraction of the Universe would lead to almost the same result.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Regardless of how far or how close any hypothetical point in space and time would be, it would still be the same point because nothingness is the same everywhere. The only point of nothingness is nothingness itself. There is no real space beyond nothingness and no real-time. The only way for nothingness to “survive” or “outlive” its nothingness is to live with the Being and move into the Being. The symbiosis of the Being with the Nonbeing is the source of life and space and time (space-time continuum).”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Enter a hall with high ceiling, and you feel small, in a room with low ceiling you feel like a giant. The height of human doesn't depend on numbers, we judge our height relative to the world around. Bigots hate an inclusive world not because it is unorthodox, but because it reminds them, how puny they are - how small.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Humanitarian Dictator

“My priority is not to be called an atheist or believer, but to be human. My priority is not to peddle any school of thought, but to epitomize expansion.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Little Planet on The Prairie: Dunya Benim, Sorumluluk Benim

“I’m born an ape, but I won’t die an ape, I’ll die the most spectacular human that ever lived – blasphemously tolerant, immeasurably expansive, impractically unbending, impossibly inclusive.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The God Sonnets: Naskar Art of Theology

“I am vast beyond the spell of tribe.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Oneness is the seed of infinity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Fanaticism is compensation for insecurity, supremacy is compensation for inferiority. Over a hundred books, thousands of sonnets, half a thousand limericks, half a thousand free verse poems, yet I still say, I'm incomplete.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“The fundamental distinction between a human and an ape lies not in appearance, but in how we choose to live the measly few decades of our life - as a paragon of expansion or parasite of prejudice!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Cut the wings of a dove at birth, and it'll spend its life crawling like vermin.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Pulsation: Pulsation is a foundational concept in Reichian therapy that describes the innate, rhythmic expansion and contraction of life energy (orgone) within all living organisms. Reich identified pulsation as the core biological function.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“In the vast silence of creation, two streams of orgone flowed. They were the primal dance of life itself, vibrating with a rhythm as ancient as the cosmos. These streams oscillated, throbbed, and surged with a pulse that whispers of eternity. This movement of expansion and contraction is woven into the very fabric of existence. When these streams meet and overlap, they form a harmony that births something greater—a unified force, a living system. This is superimposition, a coming together, a layering of one essence upon another.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“For me, libraries are the great equalizer. Everybody goes into the library, whether they're powerful or not, whether they're rich or not, and they realize, man, there is so much out there. We're so little compared to all that there is in this time and place that we live. I like that dimension of libraries.”
― Rick Steves

“[Librarians] have the power to expand people's perspectives, and that's the number one thing we need to do right now.”
― W. Kamau Bell