Quotes about ability

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“[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.”

“When you're in a rut, you have to question everything except your ability to get out of it.”

“Self-discipline is the ability to make yourself do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.”

“women made the best beekeepers 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting.”

“Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that's when we can start talking about equal rights.”

“At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.”

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own.”

“Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.”

“Not every child has an equal talent or an equal ability or equal motivation, but they should have the equal right to develop their talent and their ability and their motivation, to make something of themselves.”

“The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee, and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.”

“It sounds silly I know. But for me, the power of music rests in its ability to reach inside and touch the places where the deepest cuts lie. Like a benevolent god, a good song will never let you down.”

“Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax.”

“I had the right to remain silent… but I didn't have the ability.”

“Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.”

“Status ought not to be measured by a woman's ability to attract and snare a man.”

“A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.”

“The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired.”

“The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year – and to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.”

“Far too many people opened their hearts and lives at the drop of a hat. Why give someone that power over you? Why endow them with the ability to hurt you that much? Let someone in and you were asking for an emotional kicking some day.”

“And now that its ruby eyes are set into the gold, you cannot see their tear-shape, so they seem to be laughing rather than crying. It is a constant reminder to me of the human ability to create something beautiful even when things are at the darkest.”

“Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.”

“The key to power, then, is the ability to judge who is best able to further your interests in all situations. Keep friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent.”

“Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.”

“The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person.”

“A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.”

“If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive?… Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability.”

“Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.”

“What I have achieved by industry and practice, anyone else with tolerable natural gift and ability can also achieve.”

“I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.

[, New York Times, April 19, 1992]”

“You promised me I could measure your… particular abilities."
"Promised?" Kaladin asked. "I don't remember a promise."
"You grunted”

“Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows
with the ability to say no to oneself.”

“I've found that what most people call luck is often little more than raw talent combined with the ability to make the most of opportunities. (Talon Karrde)”

“What I love most about reading: It gives you the ability to reach higher ground. And keep climbing.”

“Every day, God gives us the sun — and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy.”

“The human mind had a remarkable ability both to discount what it sees and make reality conform to expectation.”

“God’s plan and His ways of working out His plan are frequently beyond our ability to fathom and understand. We must learn to trust when we don’t understand.”

“Shame resilience is the ability to say, “This hurts. This is disappointing, maybe even devastating. But success and recognition and approval are not the values that drive me. My value is courage and I was just courageous. You can move on, shame.”

“Your fey cousin here has the miraculous ability to hold his liquor--and mine, and yours, and the king's, and half the country's, I expect.”

“Asil left Bran alone with his thoughts then, because if he stayed, Bran would argue with him. This way, Bran would have no one to argue with but himself. And Asil had always credited Bran with the ability to be persuasive.”

“One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy”

“Free again, but it's just a feeling; freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose - and commit yourself to what is best for you.”

“Your ability to remain alive never ceases to amaze me.”

“When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble.”

“The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them.”

“Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a single conception of ability. At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence.”

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

“Relational skills are the most important abilities in leadership.”

“The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.”

“It doesn't matter who you are, where you come from. The ability to triumph begins with you - always.”

“All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.”

“I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot. And they have been forced to make themselves useful.”

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”

“It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.”

“The ability to hurt someone is usually in direct proportion to how much that person cares about you.”

“Well, there aren’t any graves in mundane wedding ceremonies,” said Tessa. “Though your ability to quote the Bible is impressive. Better than my aunt Harriet’s.”
“Did you hear that, James? She just compared us to her aunt Harriet.”

“Our exclusive dependence on rational thought and language has obscured our natural ability to sense the flow of energy.”

“Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one's ideas, to take a calculated risk - and to act.”

“Intelligence is not the ability to store information, but to know where to find it.”

“The word aerobics comes from two Greek words: aero, meaning “ability to,” and bics, meaning “withstand tremendous boredom.”

“With the beginning of life, comes the thirst for truth, whereas the ability to lie is gradually acquired in the process of trying to stay alive.”

“The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.”

“Unless you had a popular video on YouTube
or could perform shows in front of thousands, musical ability meant nothing.”

“I try very hard to be annoying. Don’t insult my ability to annoy.”

“I don't know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it.”

“I am like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness - until one day the ability to feel is forced into them. And I say "Look! I have no hands!" But the people all around me say: "What are hands?”

“If money is your hope for independence, you will never have it. The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.”

“My ability to persuade my wife to marry me [was] quite my most brilliant achievement …”

“The ability to discipline yourself to delay gratification in the short term in order to enjoy greater rewards in the long term, is the indispensable prerequisite for success.”

“Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.”

“The play-it-safe pessimists of the world never accomplish much of anything, because they don't look clearly and objectively at situations, they don't recognize or believe in their own abilities to overcome even the smallest amount of risk.”

“Creativity arises from our ability to see things from many different angles.”

“Do you really have the ability to control all types of undead?" Magnus asked.
"Can you really make a hundred shoes in a single night?" I asked.
Magnus smiled. "Wrong kind of fairie.”

“There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.”

“There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone.”

“She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present.”

“There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention.”

“The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.”

“Relax, having kids is years away. But can you imagine? Your brains, my charm, our collective good looks… then add in the usual physical abilities dhampirs get.

It's really not even fair to everyone else.”

“Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.”

“If you give people tools, and they use their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.”

“Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.”

“Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one's development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one's ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.”

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

“You have this ability to find beauty in weird places.”

“The measure of mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job.”

“Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.”

“Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.”

“Courage moral and physical: 'anima'—the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd. Courage moral and physical: “anima”—the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.”

“The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.”

“Often, to be free means the ability to deal with the realities of one's own situation so as not to be overcome by them.”

“You’re a solid person, Sage. You’re easy on the eyes, if a little skinny, and your ability to memorize useless information is going to totally hook in some guy.”

“You're our honorary sixth member with mysterious abilities and visions of the future. The Snow White to our motley group of dwarfs. Plus, you're way better looking than the rest of these guys.”

“Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.”

“Of all the things trauma takes away from us, the worst is our willingness, or even our ability, to be vulnerable. There's a reclaiming that has to happen.”

“Ability without honor is useless.”

“The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.”

“If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it.”

“There's something else there as well, something entirely her own. An ability to look into the confusing mess of life and see things for what they are.”

“For there is nothing quite so terror-inducing as the loss of sleep. It creates phantoms and doubts, causes one to questions one's own abilities and judgement, and, over time, dismantles, from within, the body.”