Selected skill quotes

1. Maybe the Dalai Lama is the only person who is totally honest, and even with him, he's skillful not to hurt anybody. He's skillful.

2. 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.

3. Mistakes are part of the game. It's how well you recover from them, that's the mark of a great player.

4. There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

5. When I first came to Arsenal, I realised the back four were all university graduates in the art of defending. As for Tony Adams, I consider him to be a doctor of defence. He is simply outstanding.

6. If you can't learn to do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.

7. 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.

8. It is an art to have so much judgment as to apparel a lie well, to give it a good dressing.

9. Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

10. There's no one alive I can't beat.

11. It is true that the mental aspect of kung-fu is the desired end; however, to achieve this end, technical skill must come first.

12. The funny thing about our act is that dad gets the worst of it, although I'm the one who apparently receives the bruises . . . the secret is in landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand. It's a knack. I started so young that landing right is second nature with me. Several times I'd have been killed if I hadn't been able to land like a cat. Imitators of our act don't last long, because they can't stand the treatment.

13. A comedian does funny things. A good comedian does things funny.

14. What I always longed to do was to be able to paint like I can draw, most artists would tell you that, they would all like to paint like they can draw.

15. I always urged my contemporaries to look for interest and inspiration to the development and study of drawing, but they would not listen. They thought the road to salvation lay by the way of colour.

16. Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

17. Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.

18. I make the best pancakes you'll ever have! And I claim that title gladly. On Saturdays I make them for everybody.

19. The old-fashioned idea that the simple piling up of experiences, one on top of another, can make you an artist, is, of course, so much rubbish. If acting were just a matter of experience, then any busy harlot could make Garbo's Camille pale.

20. As far as I could discover, the notion that a play could succeed without any further help from the actor than a simple impersonation of his part never occurred to Tree.

21. I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge.

22. The number of people who can copulate properly may be few; the number who can write well are infinitely fewer.

23. If the power to do hard work is not a skill, it's the best possible substitute for it.

24. I take computers practically apart and put them back together. I have a supercomputer I built over the years out of different computers.

25. If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.

26. Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.

27. I can embarrass myself very easily on guitar. It's funny because people say to me I can play anything; I'm God on the guitar. But I could make a big list of everything I can't play... I'm grateful that people don't notice that.

28. Basic anatomy. That has got to be the ongoing frustration: Why can't my fingers do what I want them to do? Not being able to play what I hear in my head - that is the ultimate source of frustration.

29. Expression, sentiment, truth to nature, are essential: but all those are not enough. I never care to look at a picture again, if it be ill composed; and if well composed I can hardly leave off looking at it.

30. Notable talents are not necessarily connected with discretion.

31. A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.

32. If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

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

34. The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.

35. The thing that makes you know that Vernon Ward is a good painter is if you look at his ducks, you can see the eyes follow you around the room.

36. There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.

37. Every artist was first an amateur.

38. If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus.

39. Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

40. Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones.

41. I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this... that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes... pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts... all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees 'steel' as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not.

42. Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices... TV, jets, freeways and so on... but I hope it's been made plain that the real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil. That's why I went to so much trouble to show how technology could be used to destroy the evil. A person who knows how to fix motorcycles... with Quality... is less likely to run short of friends than one who doesn't. And they aren't going to see him as some kind of object either. Quality destroys objectivity every time.

43. Am I no a bonny fighter?