89 Mastery Quotes

The question isn't whether you have a good master or a bad master. It's to be your own master. That is the dignity of humanity.

I believe in the ability of focusing strongly in something, then you are able to extract even more out of it. It's been like this all my life, and it's been only a question of improving it, and learning more and more and there is almost no end. As you go through you just keep finding more and more. It's very interesting, it's fascinating.

For the first lesson, I want you to play over every column of Modern Chess Openings, including the footnotes. And for the next lesson, I want you to do it again.

Even today, I dare not say that I have reached a state of achievement. I'm still learning, for learning is boundless.

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

I hope martial artists are more interested in the root of martial arts and not the different decorative branches, flowers or leaves.

Weaknesses in men of genius are usually an exaggeration of their personal feeling; in the hands of feeble imitators they become the most flagrant blunders. Entire schools have been founded on misinterpretations of certain aspects of the masters. Lamentable mistakes have resulted from the thoughtless enthusiasm with which men have sought inspiration from the worst qualities of remarkable artists because they are unable to reproduce the sublime elements in their work.

In conclusion, if you want to unravel the multitude of secrets of chess then don't begrudge the time.

There is timing in everything. Timing in strategy cannot be mastered without a great deal of practice.

Speed is not part of the true Way of strategy. Speed implies that things seem fast or slow, according to whether or not they are in rhythm. Whatever the Way, the master of strategy does not appear fast.

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.

The Inmost is one with the Inmost; yet the form of the One is not the form of the other; intimacy exacts fitness. He therefore who liveth by air, let him not be bold to breathe water. But mastery cometh by measure: to him who with labour, courage, and caution giveth his life to understand all that doth encompass him, and to prevail against it, shall be increase. 'The word of Sin is Restriction': seek therefore Righteousness, enquiring into Iniquity, and fortify thyself to overcome it.

Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives.

One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular.

I'm not a master, I'm a student-master, meaning that I have the knowledge of a master and the expertise of a master, but I'm still learning, So I'm a student-master. I don't believe in the word master, I consider the master as such when they close the casket.

Learn the principle, abide by the principle, and dissolve the principle. In short, enter a mold without being caged in it. Obey the principle without being bound by it. LEARN, MASTER AND ACHIEVE!!!

Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention:All his works are marked by emotional extremes - tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm.

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.

Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I've understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. The height of cultivation is really nothing special. It is merely simplicity; the ability to express the utmost with the minimum. It is the halfway cultivation that leads to ornamentation. Jeet Kune-Do is basically a sophisticated fighting style stripped to its essentials.

The highest technique is to have no technique. My technique is a result of your technique; my movement is a result of your movement. A good JKD man does not oppose force or give way completely. He is pliable as a spring; he is the complement and not the opposition to his opponent's strength. He has no technique; he makes his opponent's technique his technique. He has no design; he makes opportunity his design. One should not respond to circumstance with artificial and 'wooden' prearrangement. Your action should be like the immediacy of a shadow adapting to its moving object. Your task is simply to complete the other half of the oneness spontaneously.

I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have the light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me...

Second is the Water book. With water as the basis, the spirit becomes like water. Water adopts the shape of its receptacle, it is sometimes a trickle and sometimes a wild sea. ... If you master the principles of sword-fencing, when you freely beat one man, you beat any man in the world. The spirit of defeating a man is the same for ten million men. ... The principle of strategy is having one thing, to know ten thousand things.

To master the virtue of the long sword is to govern the world and oneself, thus the long sword is the basis of strategy. The principle is 'strategy by means of the long sword'. If he attains the virtue of the long sword, one man can beat ten men. Just as one man can beat ten, so a hundred men can beat a thousand, and a thousand men can beat ten thousand. In my strategy, one man is the same as ten thousand, so this strategy is the complete warrior's craft. The Way of the warrior does not include other Ways, such as Confucianism, Buddhism, certain traditions, artistic accomplishments and dancing. But even though these are not part of the Way, if you know the Way broadly you will see it in everything. Men must polish their particular Way.

If you do not look at things on a large scale it will be difficult for you to master strategy. If you learn and attain this strategy you will never lose even to twenty or thirty enemies. More than anything to start with you must set your heart on strategy and earnestly stick to the Way. You will come to be able to actually beat men in fights, and to be able to win with your eye. Also by training you will be able to freely control your own body, conquer men with your body, and with sufficient training you will be able to beat ten men with your spirit.

Study strategy over the years and achieve the spirit of the warrior. Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men. ... Even if you kill an enemy, if it is not based on what you have learned it is not the true Way.

To attain the Way of strategy as a warrior you must study fully other martial arts and not deviate even a little from the Way of the warrior. With your spirit settled, accumulate practice day by day, and hour by hour. Polish the twofold spirit heart and mind, and sharpen the twofold gaze perception and sight. When your spirit is not in the least clouded, when the clouds of bewilderment clear away, there is the true void.

The height of cultivation runs to simplicity. Halfway cultivation runs to ornamentation.

You must do over the same subject ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must appear accidental, even a movement.

I have three masters: Nature, Velazquez and Rembrandt.

In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo's definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which complicates and confuses a pattern

Painting is not very difficult when you don't know how; but when you know, oh! then, it's another matter.

They more adeptly bend the willow's branches who have experience of the willow's roots.

A man may be so much of every thing, that he is nothing of any thing.

I found it as alluring as a wayward woman and determined to tame it.

Try to grasp the essence of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces, and you will again find God in them. One man has written or said it in a book, another in a painting.

Perhaps, The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master.

He is terribly rare. He is like Bach, who in his time had a great concentration of ability, essence, knowledge, a spread of music. Astaire has that same concentration of genius; there is so much of the dance in him that it has been distilled

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

He's just scary smart, sort of smarter than everyone else in the room. There's just a handful of these people who know absolutely everything about the process. They could do everyone's job brilliantly. Every aspect is under their control.

The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.

One has attained to mastery when one neither goes wrong nor hesitates in the performance.

A man who is a master of patience is master of everything else.

'Could you try not aiming so much?' he asked me, still standing there. 'If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck.' He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. 'How can it be luck if I aim?' I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. 'Because it will be,' he said. 'You'll be glad if you hit his marble - Ira's marble - won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it.'

In limitations he first shows himself the master, And the law can only bring us freedom.

Few men make themselves masters of the things they write or speak.

'When i say Abhinaya, oh, I can't do the abhinaya like what the great man did here yesterday' - Great Bharatanatyam dancer Balasaraswati next day after Chakyar's lecture-demonstration at Madras Music Academy in 1973.[3]

'the greatest eye-wizard of the world!' - Stella Kramrisch - Curator of Indian Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA.[7]

'No one is like the Emperor of Abhinaya- Mani Madhava Chakyar, and there won't be any' - Prof. Maria Christopher Byrski (first foreigner disciple of Guru and Kutiyattam), Department of Indology, Warsaw University[8]

'Late Shri. Cakyar, was not just a skilled exponent and a capable teacher of Kutiyattam, his wisdom and depth of knowledge made him worthy of the title 'Acharya' ' - Dr. Prem Lata Sharma (noted Hindi writer and scholar of Indian arts and literature)[15]

The very object of an art, the principle of its artifice, is precisely to impart the impression of an ideal state in which the man who reaches it will be capable of spontaneously producing, with no effort of hesitation, a magnificent and wonderfully ordered experession of his nature and our destinies.

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

He who knows himself is his own master.

It takes a long time to bring excellence to maturity.

Mozart never did too little and never too much; he always attains but never exceeds his goal. ~ Franz Grillparzer

Mozart is the most inaccessible of the great masters. ~ Artur Schnabel