Ruth Negga Quotes

People are shaped in myriad ways by their upbringing and family. We also have agency in our lives, the people we become, and the lives we lead.

I grew up playing with kids from Hurt Village, playing with kids from other housing projects, Lamar Terrace, because my grandmother lived in that particular area. So, I always wondered how I would have turned out if I would have lived in that particular given circumstance.

Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.

The child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who have filled him up with it. No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.

There are so many things that we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.

Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.

Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.

There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished...Moreover, the incurable unfinishedness keeps man perpetually immature, perpetually capable of learning and growing.

Poverty is not just a lack of money; it is not having the capability to realize one's full potential as a human being

We are each given a block of marble when we begin a lifetime, and the tools to shape it into sculpture... We can drag it behind us untouched, we can pound it into gravel, we can shape it into glory.

A child is not a salmon mousse. A child is a temporarily disabled and stunted version of a larger person, whom you will someday know. Your job is to help them overcome the disabilities associated with their size and inexperience so that they get on with being that larger person.

Infancy is the realm conveyed to us in dreams which look backward to the past. Adolescence, more like a work of art, is a prospective symbol of personal synthesis and of the future of humankind. Like a work of art that sets us on the pathway to new discoveries, adolescence promotes new meanings by mobilizing energies that were initially invested in the past.

All of us started normal. All of us started out as functioning human beings with the potential to do almost anything we wanted, but somewhere along the paths of our lives, we got lost.

Man is born only as a potential. He can become a thorn for himself and for others, he can also become a flower for himself and for others.

Every moment is a moment of decision, and every moment turns us inexorably in the direction of the rest of our lives.

He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.

Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces.

Look, no matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We don’t see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become. But if you’re surrounded by people who say ‘I want mine now,’ you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it.

In life you don't regret the things you do, you regret the things you don't do.

There is one further distinguishing characteristic of man which is very specific indeed and about which there can be no dispute, and that is the faculty of self-improvement - a faculty which, with the help of circumstance, progressively develops all our other faculties.

Man is the nobler growth our realms supply, And souls are ripened in our northern sky.

I believe that every human being is potentially capable within his 'limits' of fully 'realizing' his potentialities; that this, his being cheated and choked of it, is infinitely the ghastliest, commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world can assure itself.

In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.

The human being is so constructed that he pressed toward fuller and fuller being.