Ability Quotes

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Asil left Bran alone with his thoughts then, because if he stayed, Bran would argue with him. This way, Bran would have no one to argue with but himself. And Asil had always credited Bran with the ability to be persuasive.

Patricia Briggs

If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.

Stephen Jay Gould

There are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain... Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment.

Margaret Atwood

Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries.

Everything we are given or learn or possess in any real sense — the ability to play Beethoven sonata, write books, understand the principles of physics — is intended for one thing: to draw us closer to our selves.

Phyllis Theroux

We commonly think of freedom as the ability to define alternatives and choose between them. The creative mind exceeds this liberty in being able to redefine itself and reality at large, generating whole new sets of alternatives.

What we do when defeat stares us in the face is the real touchstone of character. But the very fact that success has time and again proved the means of awakening people to the knowledge of greater ability than they ever before dreamed they possessed, ought to hearten and encourage us to keep on no matter how often we fail. If we brace ourselves and continue to push forward we will ultimately win out.

Orison Swett Marden

Citizen journalism is rapidly emerging as an invaluable part of delivering the news. With the expansion of the Web and the ever-decreasing size and cost of camera phones and video cameras, the ability to commit acts of journalism is spreading to everyone.

Arianna Huffington

The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture.. The unique talent of leaders is their ability to understand and work with culture; and that it is an ultimate act of

By yielding its imagination to the forms around it, has the church, like ancient Israel, lost the ability to be an alternative people of God?

Let us celebrate the soil. Most men toil that they may own a piece of it; they measure their success in life by their ability to buy it.

Charles Dudley Warner

There are those who are going to be disappointed when no life is found on other planets. Not I — I want to be reminded and delighted and surprised once again, through interplanetary exploration, with the infinite variety and novelty of phenomena that can be generated from such simple principles. The test of science is its ability to predict. Had you never visited the earth, could you predict the thunderstorms, the volcanoes, the ocean waves, the auroras, and the colorful sunset? A salutary lesson it will be when we learn of all that goes on on each of those dead planets — those eight or ten balls, each agglomerated from the same dust cloud and each obeying exactly the same laws of physics.

Richard Feynman

Questions about a theory which do not affect its ability to predict experimental results correctly seem to me quibbles about words, rather than anything more substantial, and I am quite content to leave such questions to those who derive some satisfaction from them.

[Capitalism]... is a great troll. It settles in a society, and then eats away silently. Eats more and more freedom, more humanity, more human rights, more ability to speak...

Ingeborg Refling Hagen

You have to admit, half the people who work here are mildly autistic; poor social skills, the ability to obsess on anything numerical or repetitive, the odd outfits, the paranoia and the sense of continually being judged and measured.

Douglas Coupland

Soon, the enterprise of the information age will find itself immobilized if it does not have the ability to tap the information resources within and without its boundaries.

We have a ways to go in understanding the power of puppetry … Our problem is for too long we have thought of puppets being for children. … The appeal of puppetry to me is it's much more freeing for an artist … Puppetry is a completely controllable means to attack your characters in every possible way. The artist has the possibility to create a much larger landscape with puppetry. The human becomes more human in that sense. Another of the great things about puppetry is the ability to transform.

If courage is acting according to one's conscience despite pain or fear, then strength is the ability to keep conscience awake and in force despite the demands of authorities to do otherwise.

Whatever you have received more than others-in health, in talents, in ability, in success, in a pleasant childhood, in harmonious conditions of home life-all this you must not take to yourself as a matter of course. In gratitude for your good fortune, you must remember in return some sacrifice of your own life for another life.

Albert Schweitzer

The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The ability to play is one of the principal criteria of mental health.

I would have any one, who really and truly has leisure and ability, make verses. I think it a more refining and happy-making occupation than any other pastime accomplishment.

The next phase of the work was when Joseph LeDoux and I came up with the idea of the interpreter. Twenty-five years into studying these patients we finally got around to asking the patients, "Why did you do that?" after they had a response with the left hand that was being governed by the separated, silent, speechless right hemisphere. We began to understand that the left hemisphere "made up" a story as to why the patient did what he/she did, and in that moment we began to see the cardinal feature of the left hemisphere: the ability to interpret actions generated outside its realm of conscious awareness.

Michael Gazzaniga

Real compassion lies within our ability to remember that an angry, vengeful or hateful person is usually just someone who can no longer bear the weary weight of his or her own carefully concealed despair.

When trust is lost, a nation's ability to transact business is palpably undermined.