From: X-Men: First Class
Genre: Movies
Who said it?: Charles Xavier
The story behind the quote: The very first live-action X-Men films, which was shown in 2000, clearly showed that the friendship between Charles Xavier (who would become Professor X and the founder of the X-Men) and Erik Lehnsherr (also known as the mutant terrorist, Magneto) has ended. While they do behave cordially when they talk, it is clear that they have opposite ideals for how mutants should interact with the ordinary humans. However, the films never explored their friendship as deep as the pseudo-reboot in X-Men: First Class.
The film starts in the 60’s around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A mutant named Sebastian Shaw is attempting to start World War III in the hopes that mutants will take over after the war. Erik Lehnsherr has a personal stake on this as he witnessed Shaw kill his mother during the Holocaust.
Since he has been training his mutant ability at an extremely young age, he believes that he has gained ultimate mastery of it. As proof, he tells Xavier to shoot at him point blank with a gun since he knows he’ll be able to stop the bullet as it fires. Xavier then tells him that, if that’s the case, then he’ll never really become as strong with his ability as he can.
Geek wisdom: It easy to play it safe and be satisfied with what we know, never really venturing outside our comfort zone. Even thinking of trying to do something that is extremely difficult makes us uneasy and, mentally, we can give up without trying. But the only way we can improve ourselves is if we try to do something difficult.
It’s like when we were toddlers; we could could move around by crawling. There was really no need to walk since crawling was sufficient. We don’t remember it but we all struggled with learning how to simply stand up and we fell down a lot. However, with practice, we all now able to stand on our own two feet.
Any task can seem daunting and even impossible. However, unless we try and practice several times, we will never really be able to say it’s impossible.