abilities Quotes

“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.”

“One may know how to conquer without being able to do it.”

“[P]eople are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.”

“I can DO ANYTHING I want, but I can’t DO EVERYTHING I want.”

“It’s not so much ability as attitude.”

“It’s folly to measure your success in money or fame. Success is measured only by your ability to say yes to these two questions: Did I do the work I needed to do? Did I give it everything I had?”

“Thou must hasten therefore; not only because thou art every day nearer unto death than other, but also because that intellective faculty in thee, whereby thou art enabled to know the true nature of things, and to order all thy actions by that knowledge, doth daily waste and decay: or, may fail thee before thou die.”

“Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain.”

“Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out.”

“No man knows what he can do until he tries.”

“What you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do.”

“How you feel about your abilities - your academic ‘self-concept’- in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your motivation and confidence.”

“Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.”

“The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.”

“He was well aware of his own considerable abilities, and nervously exaggerated them in his self-conceit.”

“We are not prepared to go where we need to go. So we do not clearly see the need to end something, or we maintain false hope, or we just are not able to do it. As a result, we stay stuck in what should now be in our past.”

“Michael’s gift is that the Good Lord gave him the ability to forget. He’s mad at no one and doesn’t really care what happened. His story might be sad, but he’s not sad.”

“And I would eat them in a boat, And I would eat them with a goat…”

“Could you, would you, with a goat? I would not, could not, with a goat!”

“A train! A train! A train! A train! Could you, would you, on a train?”

“Would you, could you, in the rain?”

“It was the joy of admiration and of one’s own ability, growing together.”

The noble lord, confined to his armchair, would have given his whole fortune to be able to travel around the world, in ten years even; and he bet four thousand pounds on Phileas Fogg.

“I’ve always said to myself that if a little pocket calculator can do it why shouldn’t I?”

“They’d altered what rabbits do naturally because they thought they could do better...You say buck rabbits don’t dig...But they could if they wanted to. suppose we had deep, comfortable burrows to sleep in? ...And there’s nothing to stop us from having them, except that buck rabbits won’t dig. Not can’t-won’t.”

“He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survived.”

“In most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence.”

“We fear that we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice tells us. That we actually have the guts, the perseverance, the capacity.”

“Birdbrain, thought Mrs. Frisby, and then recalled what her husband used to say: The size of the brain is no measure of its capacity. And well she might recall it, for the crow’s head was double the size of her own.”

“He wasn’t born an athlete. He made himself one.”