Ability Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Abraham Lincoln

Franz Kafka

Karl Marx

Henry David Thoreau

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Oscar Wilde

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

Abraham Lincoln

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. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty.

Capital is money, capital is commodities. … By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious effort.

Henry David Thoreau

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Excellence is the unlimited ability to improve the quality of what you have to offer.

If you have ability in a certain area, why not capitalize on it and improve it and use it?

Wilt Chamberlain

Experience shows that success is due less to ability than to zeal.

The sign of an intelligent people is their ability to control emotions by the application of reason.

Charm... is the ability to make someone else think that both of you are pretty wonderful.

Kathleen Winsor

War is a beastly business, it is true, but one proof we are human is our ability to learn, even from it, how better to exist

M. F. K. Fisher

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.

John D. Rockefeller

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

Barbara Johnson

Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one's poise and prestige (such as the butler, or the man under the bed — but never the husband).

It is understanding that gives us an ability to have peace. When we understand the other fellow's viewpoint, and he understands ours, then we can sit down and work out our differences.

Harry S. Truman

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them — a diminishing number in my case.

The mark of a great player is in his ability to come back. The great champions have all come back from defeat.

More often than not, one meets technicians, nimble keyboardists by profession, who … indeed astound us with their prowess without ever touching our sensibilities.... stirring performance depends upon an alert mind which is willing to follow reasonable precepts in order to reveal the content of the compositions.
What comprises good performance? The ability through singing or playing to make the ear conscious of the true content and affect of a composition. Any passage can be so radically changed by modifying its performance that it will be scarcely recognizable.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. Simplification is the essence of abstraction from which objective values are not necessarily eliminated.

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

When I think of vision, I have in mind the ability to see above and beyond the majority.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

In England, the profession of the law is that which seems to hold out the strongest attraction to talent, from the circumstance, that in it ability, coupled with exertion, even though unaided by patronage, cannot fail of obtaining reward.

Charles Babbage