Quotes About Mastery

Knowledge plus action is power

I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.

Crucial decisions in business are taken as much for emotional reasons as for logical ones, perhaps even more so. The tabulators inspired a level of emotion in Flint and in other powerful American businessmen that did indeed make these people feel certain they were witnessing a momentous breakthrough in humankind's mastery of information.

If you need a gun to do it with, you aren't doing it right." Sheriff Bud Smith.

That of which we are not aware, owns us.

Only those who have patience to do simple things perfectly ever acquire the skill to do difficult things easily.

The challenge is to always improve, to always get better, even when you are the best. Especially when you are the best.

The challenge is to always improve, to always get better, even when you are the best. Especially when you are the best. Henry

Fucking really is one of those activities that "practice makes perfect".

If I was going to become a great detective, I would have to learn to master my own libido.

If one makes himself master of one vital book, he shall never become a commonplace man.

The instrument of leadership is the self, and mastery of the art of leadership comes from mastery of the self.

They shared a fondness for barbed humor and skill at using it to defuse stress. Each recognized the other as a master of this dangerous game, producing mutual respect.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenes until they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway, critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drove him to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in works of genius?

It is the desire of all finite players to be Master Players, to be so perfectly skilled in their play that nothing can surprise them, so perfectly trained that every move in the game is foreseen at the beginning.

A true Master Player plays as thought the game is already in the past, according to a script whose every detail is known prior to the play itself.

Michelangelo once said that David already exists in the unpolished block of marble; the artist's job is to set him free by carving away everything that isn't David.

[B]ut in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own.

Charles Portis shows his mastery of place and the more complicated subtleties of time.

Todos los grandes cuadros son en realidad autorretratos.

They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.