Quotes About Skill

They should stick to knitting," Napoleon had once said.

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.

What is at stake here for owners is not the amount of property as such, but its ability to draw an audience for whom it will be appropriately emblematic; that is, and audience who will see it as just compensation for the effort and skill used in acquiring it.

Craftwork--it is neither as easy as faith, nor as sure as science.

Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.

In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.

He played with relish, sleeves rolled up, smiling at his work, tinkling from the low ranges to the high with the tricky syncopation of a tap dancer going up a Ziegfeld staircase.

there's one thing I'm good at, it's lying on my feet. It's sort of a gift I have.

It's a perfectly handy skill for any boy to know." "Certainly it is, if he needs to hail a passing tugboat.

A finely developed sense of timing—knowing when to wait and when to act—would remain in Lincoln's repertoire of leadership skills the rest of his life.

It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.

I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.

You are a mathematician,' John Dee said. 'I am a musician,' said Lymond.

Do you swim? Hunt? Wrestle? I see. Can you use a crossbow? Your longest shot? Can you count? Read and write? Ah, the sting of sarcasm—Have we a scholar here? Then produce us a specimen," said Lymond. "What about some modest quatrains? Frae vulgar prose to flowand Latin. Deafen us, enchant us, educate us, boy.

She ought to be at home in Flaw Valleys, doing her morning exercise on the lute, at which, said her teacher, she would have had a distinguished future, had she not been born English.

It was because these men, whatever their profession—philosopher, architect, lawyer, painter, doctor, artist and priest—were by force of the times they lived in soldiers also, and understood that speed and skill and toughness and above all self-confidence came from being pushed again and again and again past the edge of endurance until that limit became as elastic as an extra muscle, held in reserve.

A long time afterwards, she was to remember what an excellent chess-player Francis Crawford was.

Versatility is one of the few human traits which are universally intolerable. You may be good at Greek and good at painting and be popular. You may be good at Greek and good at sport, and be wildly popular. But try all three and you're a mountebank. Nothing arouses suspicion quicker than genuine, all-round proficiency.

It had been a boy's trick, Jerott remembered. Standing bareback on your father's horses; somersaulting, chariot-riding. Francis, buried in books, had never publicly attempted it. What private practice, Jerott wondered fleetingly, had gone into that?

Once before, Jerott had seen him like that, in Algiers. He had seen him as he was now, with every skill of mind and body tuned to the ultimate pitch in pursuit of one object. Francis Crawford like that was uncontrollable and very close to invincible. But not invincible. And not impervious to the reckoning afterwards.

you were speaking just now with a good deal of feeling about Treble Bob—you are not, yourself, by any chance, a ringer?" "Well," said Wimsey, "I used at one time to pull quite a pretty rope. But whether, at this time of day——

The professional interpreter is a minor miracle—far better

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. … Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

ABOYNE (vb.) To beat an expert at a game of skill by playing so appallingly that none of his clever tactics or strategies are of any use to him.