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.
I believe that starting any business should be as easy as a 10-year-old starting a lemonade stand.
I never thought very many people in the world were very much like John Laroche, but I realized more and more that he was only an extreme, not an aberration - that most people in some way or another do strive for something exceptional, something to pursue, even at their peril, rather than abide an ordinary life.
Remain faithful to the light... Remember, the sun is shining behind the clouds.
If your work isn't exciting, doesn't stir the emotions, where's the challenge? Where's the progress if you always play it safe?
I'm thirty-six years old. I'm just getting started!
Sometimes we just need a firm kick in the pants. An unsmiling expectation that if we mean all these wonderful things we talk about and sing about, then letβs see something to prove it.
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