Quotes About Mastery

And so in time the rowboat and I became one and the same-like the archer and his bow or the artist and his paint. What I learned wasn't mastery over the elements; it was mastery over myself, which is what conquest is ultimately all about.

Lincoln bore down or anything he handled, mastering both the details and the principles.

Agesilao had his rivals even in Italy, chief among them Eugenio Pini from Livorno, who could be just as short-tempered. When he fought Rue "The Invincible," the French master who, hit twice in succession, failed to acknowledge being hit as etiquette dictated, Pini pulled the button from his foil and with his next attack ripped open Rue's jacket. He then tore off his mask and shouted, "I suppose that one didn't arrive either?

What I cannot create, I do not understand.

Generally, the higher the stakes, the less often we are able to practice.

Never give people power over you until you know how to get rid of them.

The highest achievement results from mastering one's senses. Wisdom comes when we are no longer interested in worldly things.

The foraging for food and water, the struggle for life in a world without masters, housed in a body that man had made dependent on himself.

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.

Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things.

But practice pares back the impossible

he's left in the insanity of denying the bedrock of human existence. Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.

Musicians speak of bliss, but that's just to throw the uninitiated off the scent. There is no bliss; there is only control.

informal system of mastery and apprenticeship over which was laid the more recent system of the European graduate school.

True masters deconstruct as well as reconstruct.

A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms.

You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?

You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities.

Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.

Issac Stern rule: the better your technique, the more impossible your standards.

To the absolutist in every craftsman, each imperfection is a failure; to the practitioner, obsession with perfection seems a perception for failure.

We are more likely to fail as craftsmen due to our inability to organize obsession than because of our lack of ability.

The carpenter, lab technician, and conductor are all craftsmen because they are dedicated to good work for its own sake.