Quotes About Mastery

What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.

Write all the time. I believe in writing every day, at least a thousand words a day. We have a strange idea about writing: that it can be done, and done well, without a great deal of effort. Dancers practice every day, musicians practice every day, even when they are at the peak of their careers – especially then. Somehow, we don't take writing as seriously. But writing – writing wonderfully – takes just as much dedication.

If you're a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.

Shooting well with the rifle is the highest kind of skill, for the rifle is the queen of weapons; and it is a difficult art to learn.

The man [Grant] who more than any other, save Lincoln, had changed us into a nation whose citizens were all freemen, realized entirely that these freemen would remain free only while they kept mastery over their own evil passions.

You have to study your field and you have to find out how other people do it, and you have to keep working and learning and practicing and ultimately, you would be able to do it.

The scribe was a strict teacher and he did not accept anything less than perfect... Like a mother sensing the baby quickening within her, suddenly, to me, the letters were no longer hostile and unwieldly. I had command of them, with my head and with my hand... The words struck, as clear and as pure as a bell peal on a winter morning.

Who is forced to struggle more than he who tries to master himself? This ought to be our purpose, then: to conquer self, to become stronger each day, to advance in virtue.

The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces.

Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.

know a Work of Art from a Daub of Artifice)

A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.

As Jeopardy devotees know, if you're trying to win on the show, the buzzer is all. On any given night, nearly all the contestants know nearly all the answers, so it's just a matter of who masters buzzer rhythm the best.

You never learn everything on that guitar neck.

The first two days that I rode a horse, I had someone controlling it with a rope around its neck.

That's what I like about Neil Jordan's films: everyone is better at what they do than you are.

I try to master every facet of a character in order to build a safety net for myself, so I can go on to take more risks to create someone really distinct.

I will never give up on football that is played well.

Every job you do, you gain more experience. You never stop learning.

I'm going to get better and better. You never stop learning in this game.

As a guitar player, you never stop learning, never stop honing your skills.

It's hard to shape glass. It took me years of practice, and as a result, I've never gotten bored with it. It's difficult. Every time I come into the studio, I've got some sort of new challenge. And something that I would like to learn how to do better, and the material never disappoints me.

Formula 1 is such a big jump from Formula 2, and there are so many new things that you need to learn.