Quotes About Mastery

absolute power is corrupting

High performers not only practice deliberately, they think deliberately.

Self-aware learners create exceptional performances.

The best performers know themselves better than the competition.

I excel at pulling strings!" said Arachne. "I'm a spider!

Now, he realized, he simply had to take what he wanted. He had to control the winds, not the other way around (p. 434).

The truth is, almost everything we do is done poorly when we first start doing it – that's how we learn.

She said to him once that when women learned that wall anchors weren't the mysterious objects they thought they were, they would rule the world.

What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?" EDWARD BERESFORD TODD

He learned quickly. He was so big and strong that he soon out-raced, out-shot, out-boxed, out-ran, out-wrestled, and out-led-into-battle all his teachers.

From here there is never not a day without Master's shadow across my life—a solid bar, a locked turnstile that brings me up short, trapped on the other side of where I thought I was going, the place I once imagined I would be.

I do love competence in a man.

I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?

for the same reason I think people enjoy watching sports: seeing someone in full command of what he is expected to do, doing it better than most would, and doing so with joy. My

She accused me of having a thwarted sense of superiority. Said that was the cause of all my present unhappiness. I had a high degree, she said, of linguistic mastery, as well as an intuitive understanding—nuts and bolts, nontheoretical—of psychology.

What he means here is that he had thought his sons would die in the war and had readied himself for the loss. His faith in preparation is central: Freud's barely submerged premise is that death is something to be mastered, something that one prepares for or practices. "If you would endure life," he wrote in one of his essays, "be prepared for death.

That's what we all want, isn't it? Power without price.

He did not share his father's belief that the Germans were a superior type of human, but on the other hand he could see that German mastery of Europe would be no bad thing. The French had many brilliant talents—cooking, painting, fashion, wine—but they were not good at government. French officials saw themselves as some kind of aristocracy, and thought it was perfectly all right to

The Cathedral Builders by Jean Gimpel.

PreoÈ›ii deÈ›ineau o putere care nu era întodeauna egalat? de cunoÈ™tinÈ›ele pe care le aveau.

Win or lose, the crows always laughed--the hard, old jaded laughter that came of looking at the world with a black and practiced eye. From the less skillful the laugh might have hinted of despair, or silliness, like the magpies', but the crows were masters of the wry outlook, and Viv never heard them but what she followed their expert lead and laughed along--they knew the secret of black, that it could not be made blacker, and if neither could it be made lighter, it could still be made funnier.

As we said, Zen masters talk about Emptiness all the time! But they have a practice and a methodology (zazen) which allows them to discover the transcendental referent via their own developmental signified, and thus their words (the signifiers) remain grounded in experiential, reproducible, fallibilist criteria.

I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.

Understanding one's own power is more interesting than someone being given something powerful.