Showing posts with label future. Show all posts
Showing posts with label future. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 06, 2016

The territory under the hat

I am what you might call a sucker for quotes, to such an extent that I happily stop to write it down if I come come across some particularly interesting.
I met two such quotations on a wall at a large company, which I had a business purpose to visit some years ago. One of them, I later discovered, can be attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., an American physician and author, and it sounds in its simplicity:
Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
And it immediately made me think that there is no need to think twice - it's just to get started stretching. And here the other quote - which I unfortunately have not found any source for - comes in very appropriately, as it states that
The greatest undeveloped territory in the world lies under your hat.
It is a thought I think it's worth staying with, as the country, in which I stayed when I read these two quotations, was India. Curiously, a place which is considered underdeveloped by many people; people, who perhaps have plenty of potential to stretch something under their own hats. If not, our part of the world might be lagging behind even faster than one might otherwise fear.
(Translated from Territoriet under hatten, originally published September 25th, 2010).