Capacity Quotes - Page 2

There are those who have a desire to love, but do not have the capacity to love.

Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.

Hope gives us the courage to confront our circumstances and the capacity to surmount them.

Without wilderness, we will eventually lose the capacity to understand America.


The very exercise of leadership fosters capacity for it.

Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee.

My work is basically an outgrowth of the anger I feel about the human condition. The aspects of it that make me angry are our capacity for cruelty and the ability people have to ignore situations they don't like.

The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.

One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one's capacity.

I began by asking myself, “What do I want out of life?” And the answer was happiness. Investigating further, I went into the moment when I was feeling happiest. I discovered something which to me was startling at the time. It was when I was loving that I was happiest. That happiness equated to my capacity to love rather than to being loved. That was a starting point.

Selfishness is like a disease that suffocates our capacity to love. While love asks us to deny ourselves for the sake of another, selfishness demands we put ourselves first at their expense. When we choose to be self-centered, we become less kind and content—more needy, sensitive, and demanding. More unsatisfiable. Moodiness and impatience, laziness and irresponsibility, are only selfishness in disguise.

I have one talent, and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas. This is to me the supreme Hasidic imperative: Don't be old. Don't be stale.

I had only ordinary capacity but extraordinary persistency.

We don't so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems.

In joy or sorrow, health or sickness, prosperity or the reverse, the effort must still continue. One must rise after every fall and gradually acquire courage, faith, the will to succeed and the capacity to love.

Retain, even in opposition, your capacity for astonishment.

...there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love *running*. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desires, putting aside what you wanted and appreciating what you've got, being patient and forgiving and... undemanding...maybe we shouldn't be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.

For godliness is not the consequence of your capacity to imitate God, but the consequence of His capacity to reproduce Himself in you; not self-righteousness, but Christ-righteousness; the righteousness which is by faith

I imagine a world in which all humans are born with an intact capacity to love, and I am willing to devote my life to making it happen.

Congress never loses its capacity to disappoint you.

Dreaming illustrates your hidden capacities and your unawakened ability.

What is required of a working hypothesis is a fine capacity for discrimination

The gift of broadcasting is, without question, the lowest human capacity to which any man could attain.

Genius: The capacity to see and to express what is simple, simply!