229 Skill Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.

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.

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.

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.

Notable talents are not necessarily connected with discretion.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Every artist was first an amateur.

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.

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

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

[He] hath shewed himselfe singular in the immortall Epitaph of his beloved Astrophell, besides many other most absolute Comike inventions.

He had a touch most guitarists would kill for.

Sir Timothy was a fluent speaker, and when there was nothing to be said was possessed of a great plenty of words. And he was gifted with that peculiar power which enables a man to have the last word in every encounter,-a power which we are apt to call repartee, which is in truth the readiness which comes from continual practice. You shall meet two men of whom you shall know the one to be endowed with the brilliancy of true genius, and the other to be possessed of but moderate parts, and shall find the former never able to hold his own against the latter. In a debate, the man of moderate parts will seem to be greater than the man of genius. But this skill of tongue, this glibness of speech is hardly an affair of intellect at all. It is,- as is style to the writer,- not the wares which he has to take to market, but the vehicle in which they may be carried. Of what avail to you is it to have filled granaries with corn if you cannot get your corn to the consumer? Now Sir Timothy was a great vehicle, but he had not in truth much corn to send.

I went round to all these minority sports and I couldn't really appreciate them. Fencing, for example, is just 'click, click, click' and it is over. Then they retire. Then they go again 'On guard - click, click, click' and it is over again. You just think, 'what is this sport?' I thought this is really boring and then I went to Judo and it was just the same thing. These two guys just endlessly circling each other, acting as if what they are trying to do is take the others shirt off without him realising this is what they are trying to do. I just thought 'what is this? I don't understand this at all'. Then I went to table tennis, which obviously I could identify with because I had played it myself - not quite at Olympic standard - but I could understand it. It suddenly became clear to me that these people really are so far beyond anything I could ever dream of becoming. I felt really terrible because I hadn't appreciated the fencers. The reason I couldn't follow them was because they were so damn good. Their hands were so quick that I couldn't see what was going on.

...that made Lee arguably the greatest martial artist of his time, or any other.

'She's at the top of her class.' Diane Warren, writer

Astaire can't do anything bad

If people would only realize when they ask me why I don't do a picture with him - they ask me that all the time, and were quite keen on it while I was in Hollywood - if they'd only realize that he's gone 'way ahead of me. Why I couldn't begin to keep up with him. I couldn't even reach the steps he throws away

'Jude Law is one of the finest actors of our time ...' - Sean Penn

You're very good at this. Practice a little more, so it doesn't sound memorized, and speeches like that will make your fortune, I promise you

I am a highly-trained broadcast specialist

Besides rapping the only thing I did good was scrapping

Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it.

Not only can I touch your car, but I can take a lathe, an acetylene torch, a pair of pliers, and a ball tine hammer and have that in about 150 different pieces in fifteen minutes; that's how gooooood I am.

How does he do that?

My best field marshal.

Ayrton Senna was an extraordinary racing driver. His skills, craft, subtlety and courage were of such magnitude that he dwarfed his generation of drivers.

I think it's quite painfully obvious when someone's practicing through an amp, as opposed to someone who's really laying down some stuff that just happens to be fast.

Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.

A lot of what acting is, is paying attention.

Ability hits the mark where presumption overshoots and diffidence falls short.

So clever...he can do anything, get around anything.

As a dancer, I out-Fred the nimblest Astaire

Win with ability, not with numbers.

Judgment of eye, speed and attack are the basis of victory.

There is nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever.

Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.

A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct styles requisite: I intend, in the course of my career, if I have time, to give a specimen of both.

Only the skilled can judge the skilfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.

That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them.

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

Le desir de paraitre habile empeche souvent de le devenir.

C'est une grande habilete que de savoir cacher son habilete.

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

Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

[On David Beckham:] 'He cannot kick with his left foot, he cannot head a ball, he cannot tackle and he doesn't score many goals. Apart from that he's all right.'

'He was able to use either foot - sometimes he seemed to have six.' (Sir Matt Busby)

To carry a rabbit's foot is a sign that you are a good shot- or have a friend that is.

Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.

Now she's on a diet. Coconuts and bananas. She hasn't lost any weight. But she can climb a tree!

She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

Any subject can be made interesting, and therefore any subject can be made boring.

Be content to remember that those who can make omelettes properly can do nothing else.

Life's not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes playing a poor hand well.

The acme of judicial distinction means the ability to look a lawyer straight in the eyes for two hours and not hear a damned word he says.

His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen it through.

I honestly have no clue how to play [piano]. But if you walk into a room with a baby grand, you're kind of obligated to fuck around on it. (2003)

He could hit a whole bucket of balls from there and not get one closer than that.

Silent Bob is an electrical genius. Back in the high school science fair, he turned his mom's vibrator into a cd player useing some chicken wire and shit. Motherfuckers like McGyver, NO motherfucker is better than McGyver!

'Oh, no, my dear; I'm really a very good man, but I'm a very bad Wizard, I must admit.'

Now, I don't want to give you the impression that I'm a great musicologist, but I'm a lot better than what I was described as for a long, long time; you know, people said I only knew three chords when I knew five.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.

Sex is like bridge; if you don't have a good partner, you better have a good hand.[7]

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

'With a few movements of the eye, he could manifest the mountains, the ocean, the rivers, the moonlit valleys, torrential rain, the gait of the swan and the elephant, a tornado, the opening of the lotus flowers and a lot else. To see him do it was to know that he was a non-pareil' - P.T. Narendra Menon (noted art critic and poet)[12]

'His historic talent was backed up by extraordinary erudition. Behind his wizardry with the eyes lay sustained practice undertaken with devotion and discipline' - L.S Rajagopalan (noted art critic)[16]

As happens with sports and hobbies, his enjoyment was solemnized by expertise, the rites of comparing, collating, a half-deliberate parody of scholarship like the recitation of batting averages.

Since I would rather make of him an able man than a learned man, I would also urge that care be taken to choose a guide with a well-made rather than a well-filled head.