Quotes About Mastery

We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.

Someone has said that all the great jugglers are dead.

Science has helped us to understand and master ourselves, creating an elevated new form of human life, the wealth and beauty of which cannot be pictured today by the keenest imagination.

You can be an expert any field of study with consistent effort and consistent learning.

Quality is better than quantity.

When I choose to smile I become the master of my emotions.

The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths.

The cacophony in my head is completely unmanageable, and it's out of the failure to blend all those dissonant voices smoothly that whatever individuality I might have has managed to emerge. Imitation is the condition of originality. Or, to put it another way: imitation is the shortest route to and the truest test of proficiency. To mimic a master requires skill and practice, which become the sources of your own mastery.

Modern man fell into the trap of believing that everything can be explained, that reality is a simple affair which has only to be organized in order to be mastered.

Much of what feels like mastery in adult life is actually the avoidance of a challenge.

Control was the basis of all humor. Even at its most innocent, what was a joke or a clever comment if not a way to take control? To become King of the Moment.

but they are commonly more distinguished by their superiority in the latter than in the former. Their

The best actors work the hardest but make it look easy. You have to master your nerves to do the job. You have to be willing to make a fool out of yourself. After a while, if you're smart and paying attention, bit by bit, line by line, you begin to understand how to interpret a character.

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt.

How different everything is for the craftsman who transforms a part of the world with his own hands, who can see his work as emanating from his being and can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object — whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug — and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years..

Great masters merit emulation, not worship.

We're just too good at our job." "Damn it," Valkyrie scowled. "I hate being too good at our job.

The sign of the true expert is his modest awareness of how much more there is to know;

The sign of the true expert is his modest awareness of how much more there is to know; how complex and nuanced the subject at hand insists on remaining.

Everybody at some level believes in it. It's a deeply seductive image. The image that we all want, as oppressed people, is an image of our masters finally loving us and recognizing our humanity. It is this image that keeps prostitutes with their pimps, the colonized with their colonizers and battered women with their batterers. Everybody dreams of one day being safe.

man the master of his own destiny and the creator of his own desires,

Humans have the ability to control fire, water, plants as well as animals, something that no other living organism can do. But we struggle to control the human mind: our mind as well as the mind of those around us.

Tolkien worked like a painter who first pencils in a rough sketch, erases, then draws again, then fills in a more detailed drawing, then adds layers of color, working from background to foreground to final details.