The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.
Interpretation
Aiming too low can prevent us from reaching our full potential.
This quote by Michelangelo highlights the peril of setting insufficiently challenging goals. Instead of fearing failure from aiming high, we should be concerned about the complacency that comes from seeking only easy achievements, which limits our true potential and growth.
In practice
In a motivational speech to encourage students to pursue ambitious career goals.
The art of creation lies in the gift of perceiving the particular and generalizing it, thus creating the particular again. It is therefore a powerful transforming force and a generator of creative solutions in relation to a given problem.
The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell; The sculptor's hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone.
Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.
If it be true that any beautiful thing raises the pure and just desire of man from earth to God, the eternal fount of all, such I believe my love.
Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.
There is an angel imprisoned in it and I must set it free.
Still a dreamer, yet more of a realist than ever before, I knew this was my time to sail. On the horizon I saw the shining future, as before. The difference now was that I felt the wind at my back. I was ready.
Courage is required to make an initial thrust toward one's coveted goal, but even greater courage is called for when one stumbles and must make a second effort to achieve. Have the determination to make the effort, the single-mindedne ss to work toward a worthy goal, and the courage not only to face the challenges that inevitably come but also to make a second effort, should such be required.
Do not wait until the conditions are perfect to begin. Beginning makes the conditions perfect.
During the first few minutes in lift-off, the astronauts were strictly controlled and were powerfully buffeted by the forces of nature struggling to keep them on earth. This is somewhat comparable to the pull of the flesh when our alarm goes off early in the morning. Unless we put "mind over mattress" and carry out the resolves made the night before, we will experience our first defeat that day. Not sufficient to finish. Mission aborted.
Only he who gives up is defeated. Everyone else is victorious.
I don't want an epitaph on my gravestone that says, 'He would have pursued some big dreams in his life, but other people wouldn't let him.
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