Quotes About Ability

I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.

Power will always be restricted to a relatively small number of selected persons. Anyone can be strong.

Ask any good teacher or any business executive who's been in the trenches. They will tell you that attitude trumps ability every time.

Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.

In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.

It's a perfectly handy skill for any boy to know." "Certainly it is, if he needs to hail a passing tugboat.

I have plenty of information now, but I can't get it into words. I'm afraid it's too big a task for me. I wonder if I will find everything in life too big for my abilities. Well, time will tell. Theodore Roosevelt, writing in naval history in his spare time while in law school

Charles Washburn, a classmate at Harvard, considered Roosevelt's ability to concentrate a signal ingredient to his success. "If he were reading," observed Washburn with astonishment, "the house might fall about his head, he could not be diverted.

Scholars who have studied the development of leaders have situated resilience, the ability to sustain ambition in the face of frustration, at the heart of potential leadership growth.

Versatility is one of the few human traits which are universally intolerable. You may be good at Greek and good at painting and be popular. You may be good at Greek and good at sport, and be wildly popular. But try all three and you're a mountebank. Nothing arouses suspicion quicker than genuine, all-round proficiency." Kate

She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw — I don't say she will, but she can.

I was attempting to do something I had never done before, and whenever we challenge ourselves, fear and doubt are inevitable. I am not sure we ever vanquish these voices. Whenever we are at the edge of our ability and experience, they always whisper in our ears, their worried words. I have come to see that these voices are actually trying to keep us safe as they warn us away from the unfamiliar and the unknown, but this does not make their daggers of self-doubt any less painful.

I had been feeling permanently on the cusp of a flu, feeling at that point where I just wanted to borrow somebody else's coat- borrow somebody else's life- their aura. I seemed to have lost the ability to create any more aura on my own.

Nerds get what they want when they want it, and they go psycho if it's not immediately available. Nerds overfocus. I guess that's the problem. But it's precisely this ability to narrow-focus that makes them so good at code writing...

Those who can't do, teach, and those who can't teach, critique.

seventy percent of human beings fall in the average or below-average range in intelligence. In other words, more than two-thirds of all human beings are average, which is stupid enough, or they're clinical morons.

He was very much a man of moods, possibly owing to what is styled the artistic temperment. I have never seen, myself, why the possession of artistic ability should be supposed to excuse a man from a decent exercise of self-control.

To cry at will is not an easy accomplishment.

Her words held all the pointed innuendo that elderly ladies are able to achieve with the minimum of actual statement.

The less their ability, the more their conceit.

Maybe he'd never come acrross anybody as well versed at objectifying body parts as I was. In my defense, this was an occupational hazard; one of the tricks of my trade was the ability to work with whatever was at hand. Over the years I'd learned to pinpoint my focus to the width of a pubic hair if there was nothing else to work with.

This little story has its charm and doesn't really hurt anyone. What is frightening is the ability of fear to drive people off the course of human behavior.

One master those arts for health in mind and body, for the ability to live one's life as courageously, uniquely, and energetically as one wishes!

It's a funny thing. When you're tired, general cognitive ability drops. There's scientific evidence to back that up, no question. Because you're slacking off, some other part of your brain—the base, the lizard, the id, whatever you want to call it—tries to compensate. Eighty-five percent brain-dead, fifteen-percent instinctive genius.