Quotes About Mastery

Good acting is really excellent carpentry.

I think, at the end of the day, if you're a good actor, then you're a good actor.

No one's born a good cook. You have to learn and practice.

I have a good feeling for the game. I know the game.

It's not that hard to make good food.

It makes me cross that no one takes great pride in doing a good job. It's so rare to find someone who really loves their trade.

My coaches have done a good job of tightening my skills, where I can dictate a little bit more where the fight is going.

If you want to just make a good movie, if you don't enjoy every step and become a master of each little moment, then you shouldn't be doing it.

If you're really good at doing what you do, good things will come.

I was watching the last season of 'Mad Men,' and they're now so in their characters and they're so comfortable in their characters, and they're doing such good work. That can only happen from doing it over and over, and developing a character over seven years.

What is good work? You just know it when you see it. You just can't explain it.

I want to become a very good writer.

You can't teach somebody how to be a good writer.

For a whole fortnight my mind and my fingers have been working around me like two lost souls. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamertine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; besides this, I practise four to five hours a day of exercises (thirds, sixths, octaves, tremolos, repetition of notes, cadenzas, etc.). Ah! provided I don't go mad you will find me an artist!

I will give Mr. Freeland the credit of being the best master I ever had, till I became my own master.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

I have learned to walk: since then I have run. I have learned to fly: since then I do not have to be pushed in order to move. Now I am nimble, now I fly, now I see myself under myself, now a god dances within me.

Happiness is the feeling that power increases - that resistance is being overcome.

Smooth ice is paradise for those who dance with expertise.

One pays dearly for any kind of mastery on earth, where perhaps one pays too dearly for everything; one is master of one's trade at the price of also being its victim.

Masters of the first rank are recognized by the fact that in matters great and small they know how to find an end perfectly, be it the end of a melody or a thought.

Nothing avails: every master has but one disciple, and that one becomes unfaithful to him, for he too is destined for mastership.   [408]

Four very strange and truly poetic human beings in this century have attained mastery in prose, for which this century was not made otherwise—for lack of poetry, as I have suggested. Not including Goethe, who may fairly be claimed by the century that produced him, I regard only Giacomo Leopardi, Prosper Mérimée, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walter Savage Landor, the author of Imaginary Conversations, as worthy of being called masters of prose.35 93

Life is the will to power; our natural desire to dominate and reshape the world to fit our own preferences and assert our personal strength to the fullest degree.