The only way to define your limits is by going beyond them.
Interpretation
You discover your true potential by pushing past your boundaries.
This quote by Arthur C. Clarke emphasizes the importance of pushing oneself beyond perceived limitations. It suggests that self-discovery and growth come from facing challenges and venturing outside of comfort zones, encouraging individuals to strive for more than what they believe they can achieve.
In practice
In a motivational speech to encourage students to pursue their dreams.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
You gotta use everything you possibly can!
The key that unlocks energy is desire. It's also the key to a long and interesting life. If we expect to create any drive, any real force within ourselves, we have to get excited.
The big secret in life is there is no secret. Whatever your goal. You can get there if you're willing to work.
A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds; it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before the change.
Even failures can turn into something positive if you just keep going. I wrote a television pilot called 'Head of the Family.' CBS didn't want it. It was considered a failure. But we reworked it. A year later, it became 'The Dick Van Dyke Show.'
There are no traffic jams when you go the extra mile.
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