100+ Quotes from the Pages of “Understanding Your Potential” by Dr Myles Munroe

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Acknowledgements

• We are a sum total of what we have learned from all who have taught us, both great and small.

Foreword Written by Jerry Horner

• “People generally fall into one of three groups: the few who make things happen, the many who watch things happen, and the overwhelming majority who have no notion of what happens” (Jerry Horner).
• “Every person is either a creator of fact or a creature of circumstance” (Jerry Horner).
• “Success is not a comparison of what we have done with what others have done. It is simply coming up to the level of our best, making the most of our abilities and possibilities” (Jerry Horner).
• “It’s comforting to know that whenever God gives me a task, He places at my disposal all the resources of heaven. I am not left to my own devices to accomplish that task” (Jerry Horner).

“I am only one
But I am one.
I cannot do everything
But I can do something.

What I can do.
I ought to do.
And what I ought to do.
By the grace of God, I shall do.”

- Canon Farrar

Chapter One — Everything in Life Has Potential

• You must understand the tremendous potential you possess and commit yourself to maximizing it in your short lifetime.

“Unless you do something beyond what you have done, you will never grow or experience your full potential” (Unknown).

• One of the great enemies of your potential is success.
• Never let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
• The greatest tragedy in life is not death, but a life that never realized its full potential.
• Potential never has a retirement plan.
• God created everything with potential, including you. He placed the seed of each thing within itself (Genesis 1:12), and planted within each person or thing He created the ability to be much more than it is at any one moment.
• Everything in life has potential.
• Everything begins as potential.
• Never accept success as a lifestyle — it is but a phase. Never accept an accomplishment as the end — it is but a mark in the process.
• The minute we begin to settle down and be satisfied with what we have, we lose the possibility of revealing what is really inside us.
• Don’t give up until you have lived out the full extent of your potential.
• If you want to succeed, strike out on new paths.
• Don’t travel the worn paths of accepted success.
• No man can climb beyond the limitations of his own belief.
• Every day sends to the grave obscure men and women whom fear prevented from realizing their true and full potential.
• Failure is not the absence of success. Failure is the neglect of trying.
• What you see is not all there is. There is something in everything.
• What you have done is no longer your potential. Potential is what you can do but have not yet done.
• The greatest threat to progress is your last successful accomplishment.

Photo by Radu Florin on Unsplash

Chapter Three — Who Are You?

• If you want to know who you are, look at God. The key to understanding life is in the source of life, not in the life itself.
• If you want to know who you are, you must look at the Creator, not the creation.
• He planted within each person or thing He created — including you — the ability to be much more than it is at any one moment.
• He sees in you more than you can possibly imagine. Your potential is limited only by God, not others.
• God can bring beauty out of your mistakes. He can take what you have messed up and bless it up. He can take the thing that seemed impossible to you and form it into something beautiful.

Chapter Four — What Happened to the Real You?

• Sin clogs our potential. It messes up the plan God has for each of our lives.
• Jesus came, not to die for Himself, but for you, so you could be reconnected with the Source of Life.

Chapter Five — Whose Wisdom?

• There is no fulfillment in life without understanding the reason for being.
• God considers foolishness any wisdom that does not fulfill its original purpose.
• The Holy Spirit is the key that allows all the dormant power within you to come to life. Without the filling of the Holy Spirit, you can never function to your fullest potential.
• The more we know about who we are, the more our attitude toward ourselves changes.
• God has prepared so many deep things about who we are. Our eyes can’t see them, nor can our minds conceive them, yet God is revealing them to us through His Spirit.
• You will never be fulfilled until you get filled with what God has that is supposed to be in you.
• The Holy Spirit, connected with your spirit, unravels the knots that have bound your thoughts, removes the streaks that have blurred your vision and clears the debris that has hidden your potential. Working like a sculptor, He brings out the beauty hidden deep within your being, because that is the real you.

Chapter Six — Why Were You Born?

• You have the potential to live out all that God has planned for your life — but only if you accept Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord.
• Self-acceptance is the key to healthy self-esteem.
• Things don’t become reality because we have an idea. We have to believe in the idea. We have to believe we can do it by committing ourselves to it — abandoning ourselves to it — even if it costs us our lives.
• Everything is possible if you will abandon yourself to an idea enough that you are willing to lose your life for it.

Photo by Bruno Kelzer on Unsplash

Chapter 7 — What Can You Do?

• The limit of your potential is God.
• Whenever God gives you a responsibility, He also gives you the ability to meet that responsibility.
• Thinking doesn’t get it done. Thinking implies you can do it. See yourself doing the thing in your thoughts. Make your thought into an idea, and your idea into an imagination. Take that imagination and document it into a plan. Then go to it (of course with the proper rest periods). Put your plan into action. If you thought it, you can do it.
• The only way to escape … dominating [sinful] habits is to understand your purpose for being.

Chapter 8 — Challenge Your Ability

• The people who are blessings to humanity are usually men and women who decide there is more to them than what other people have said. People who bless the world are people who believe there is an ability inside them to accomplish something that has never been done.
• Make a demand on yourself.
• Men and women who are assets to the world and bring change for the better are those who give their potential something to maximize.
• Men and women who make changes in history are those who have come against the odds and told the odds it is impossible for the odds to stop them.
• There are no shortcuts to developing your potential.
• Potential must be exercised to be fulfilled. Demands must be made on potential if it is to be released and fulfilled.
• The greatest works in the world will be done by people who don’t care who gets the credit. I don’t want to be famous, I just want to be faithful. I don’t want to be well-known, I want to be well-used. I don’t want to be powerful, I want to be potent. Unless you venture to try things you’ve never done before, you’ll never experience the wealth that lives within you.
• No one can climb beyond the limitations he has placed on himself. Success is never final — failure is never fatal
• A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage. Every day sends to the grave, obscure men, whom fear and timidity have prevented from making their first attempt to do something.
• Don’t be so afraid of failure that you refuse to try. Demand something of yourself. Failure is only an incident. There’s more than the failure — there’s success deep behind that failure. Failure is the opportunity to more intelligently begin again. When you fail, that is a great chance to start again. Learn from it and move on. Don’t be paralyzed by the failure.
• One good thing about failure is that it is proof that you tried. The greatest mistake you can make is to be afraid of making one. People who do nothing in life are usually people who do nothing. People who don’t make mistakes in life are usually people who didn’t have a chance to make any because they never tried. Challenge your potential. Demand things of yourself that are beyond what you have already done. Expect more from yourself than the accomplishments that are easily within your reach. What you have is not all you are. The limit of your potential is God.
• It is better to attempt a thing and fail, than to never try and not know you could succeed.

Photo by Md Mahdi on Unsplash

Chapter 9 — The Key to Your Potential

• If you decide you don’t need God, you have also decided never to become all you are capable of being.
• The key to your full potential is staying related to God.
• Jesus says, “I am the True Vine.” By this statement He implies that there are vines or sources that are not genuine.
• Prune your life through discipline and obedience to God.
• God gives you freedom, but He also puts some limitations on you. Whenever you violate your limitations, you are in rebellion against God. The only limitations of your potential are violations of God’s Word. If you do anything that doesn’t violate the Word of God, you are within your freedom. God gives you freedom to do anything except disobey Him. That’s a tremendous freedom. You are free to do anything within the context of God’s Word.
• No matter how talented or gifted you are, you will never be truly fulfilled and successful apart from a personal relationship with your Creator-Source.
• The whole purpose for your being — to reflect and increase the glory of God — is fulfilled whenever you maximize your potential.
• A disciple is a learner who follows a teacher everywhere he goes. His goal is to learn and keep on learning until he resembles the teacher. Only a disciple experiences full potential. Because his greatest desire is to know and resemble the Master, he spends hours listening to His words. He seeks new visions, revelations and understandings concerning the Master’s life and who He calls His disciples to be.

Chapter Ten — Limiting Your Unlimited Potential

• If you were aware of how much power and worth you have, the first thing that would be affected would be your attitude toward yourself.
• If you feel good about yourself, then your attitude toward others will be influenced by that attitude.
• God did not begin when the beginning began — He began the beginning. He did not start when start got started — He started start.
• Wherever something comes from determines the potential it has.
• The degree or potency of that potential can be measured by the demands made on it by the one who made it.
• The purpose [of a thing] establishes the demands to be placed on the product, and the demands determine its potential.
• The potential of a thing is therefore not determined by opinions, assumptions or prejudices, but only by the demands placed on it by the one who made it.
• If you want to know how much potential you have, first discover who created or manufactured you. Then check the demands He is making upon your life. Whatever He is demanding of you, you can do.
• If you are going to realize and maximize your full potential, you will have to understand the true nature of your potential. But to do this, you must first understand the process of your creation and the Source from which you came.
• Man does not have a spirit, he is spirit — because of the Source from which he came.
• Man came out of God and must remain related to God in order to live.
• If man is to realize and maximize his true potential, a relationship with God is not an option.
• If man is to become all he was purposed to be, God is not an alternative for man, but a requirement.
• No matter how far man progresses or how much he accomplishes, he can never experience his full potential without a personal relationship with God, his Source.
• The key to knowing your true potential is to know your Source. You will never understand, realize or maximize your true and full potential without a relationship with your Source. A man without a relationship with God (his Source) has limited his potential. He can never attain what he is capable of.
• It is essential … that we do not judge our true potential by the abilities or limitations of our physical bodies.
• You must never allow your true potential to become a victim of the limitations of your physical body or your environment. Reach beyond your grasp. Your body is not your full potential.
• You and I must not allow any physical impediment or the natural aging process to immobilize the potential that lies within us.

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

• You must refuse to limit your true potential by the limitations of your physical body.
• Man is a spirit, lives in a body, and possesses a soul.
• Never allow a teacher’s opinion or the score on an academic test or the fact that you didn’t complete your formal education to dictate the magnitude of your potential. You are as potent as your Creator says you are.

Chapter Eleven — Keys to Fulfilling Your True Potential

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us” (Oliver Wendell Holmes).

• Our potential … needs faith in order to be maximized.
• Everything in the earth must be under your subjection, not mastering you.
• Whatever God calls you to do, He has already built in.
• If you decide to do something, and you believe in it hard enough and commit yourself to work for it long enough, nothing in the universe can stop you.
• The potential to do and plan anything is in you if you will believe and persevere.
• If you can abandon yourself to an idea and sacrifice all you have for that idea, God says, “It’s possible for that idea to come to pass.
• Jesus wants to knock the limits off your mind. But first He requires that you stay hooked up with God.
• If He [God] gives you an assignment, He’s already given you the ability to fulfill what He asks.
• Along with His demand always comes the capability to meet that demand.
• A personal relationship with our Creator is a necessary key to the releasing of our full potential.
• No matter how big the dream God gave you, your potential is equal to the assignment.
• Ability is useless until it is given responsibility.
• Man’s potential was predetermined by this purpose.
• Work is a major key to releasing your potential. Potential must be exercised and demands made on it, otherwise it will remain potential.
• True potential and fulfillment in life is not what is accomplished, but who benefits from them.
• Good ideas do not bring success. Good hard work does.
• To release your true potential, you must be willing to work.
• You must guard your visions and dreams from sin, discouragement, procrastination, failures, opinions, distractions, traditions, and compromise.

Chapter Twelve — Dare to Believe in Your Potential

• Human potential without godly purpose produces self-destruction.
• It is more comfortable to think about all we might do instead of working to achieve what we can do. People who change the world are people who stop dreaming and wake up. They don’t just wish, they act.
• The summit of God’s desires for your life is that you will show through your being who He is.
• Your potential is not determined by what you look like or how far you went in school. Nor is it determined by what others think and expect from you. God, your Creator, determines the extent of your ability. Through the Holy Spirit, He enables you to develop and experience your entire potential.
• It is your desire for the thing [goal] that will keep you on the road of consistency.
• You possess the ability to achieve, develop, accomplish, produce, create, and perform anything your mind can conceive.
• Whatever God calls for, He provides for.

Photo by C D-X on Unsplash

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Understanding Your Potential — Dr Myles Munroe [Book Summary]