Quotes About Mastery

Humans act as though we were the creators and masters of language, while in fact language remains the master of us. Perhaps it is, before all else, humankind's distortion of this relation of dominance that drives our nature into alienation.

How many Germans live who speak their mother tongue effortlessly and yet are unable to understand Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or one of Hölderlin's hymns! Hence whoever has mastered the Greek language, or has some acquaintance with it by accident or choice, possess not the least proof thereby that he is able to think according to the thought of a Greek thinker.

Der Mensch gebärdet sich, als sei er Bildner und Meister der Sprache, während doch sie die Herrin des Menschen bleibt.

Courage faces fear and thereby masters it

Fear must be challenged, I have found. It is a powerful beat if it is allowed the mastery.

But it was possible to teach what one could not practice.

Fear is a powerful beast, if it is allowed the mastery.

Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it.

The supreme gift of an artist is the knowledge of when to stop.

The instant he entered I saw by his face that he had not been successful. Amusement and chagrin seemed to be struggling for the mastery, until the former suddenly carried the day, and he burst into a hearty laugh.

You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.

Said in reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein: Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target others cannot even see.

it is rare for a man who teaches to know his subject thoroughly; for if he studies it as he ought, he has in most cases no time left in which to teach it. [...]

A man cannot serve two masters: so it is either reason or the scriptures. - On Religion

Therefore if egoism has a firm hold of a man and masters him, whether it be in the form of joy, or triumph, or lust, or hope, or frantic grief, or annoyance, or anger, or fear, or suspicion, or passion of any kind—he is in the devil's clutches and how he got into them does not matter. What is needful is that he should make haste to get out of them; and here, again, it does not matter how.

Time is continually pressing upon us, never letting us take breath, but always coming after us, like a taskmaster with a whip.

A man strives to get direct mastery over things either by understanding them or by compulsion. But a woman is always and everywhere driven to indirect mastery, namely through a man; all her direct mastery being limited to him alone.

Living is a kind of skill.

Skill, surgeons believe, can be taught; tenacity cannot.

Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself.

top performers dislike practicing just as much as others do.

and then define a pattern around them.

Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered. The

You see it in the 36 percent increase between 2004 and 2007 in lawsuits against attorneys for legal mistakes—the most common being simple administrative errors, like missed calendar dates and clerical screwups, as well as errors in applying the law. You see it in flawed software design, in foreign intelligence failures, in our tottering banks—in fact, in almost any endeavor requiring mastery of complexity and of large amounts of knowledge. Such