Ability Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The physician's ability to reassure the patient is a major factor in activating the body's own healing system.

God's willingness to answer our prayers exceeds our willingness to give good and necessary things to our children, just as far as God's ability, goodness and perfection exceed our infirmities and evil.

Edward McKendree Bounds

Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular way, ought to give us ground to presume ability.

When we speak of choice, what we mean is the ability to exercise control over ourselves and our environment. In order to choose, we must first perceive that control is possible.

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

Malcolm Gladwell

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

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 God eliminated evil by programming us to perform only good acts, we would lose this distinguishing mark - the ability to make choices. We would no longer be free moral agents. We would be reduced to the status of robots.

I didn't become rich, but I was usually comfortable. That is a social disease, the symptom of which is the ability to ignore it while your society develops weeping pustules and has its brains eaten out by radioactive maggots.

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.

Maybe tips act as a magnet for all our insecurities. Maybe they're the final exam on our ability to survive on our own; will we leave too much out of nervous apology for our lives, or not enough, out of sheer incompetence?

Barbara Holland

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

Linear programming is viewed as a revolutionary development giving man the ability to state general objectives and to find, by means of the simplex method, optimal policy decisions for a broad class of practical decision problems of great complexity. In the real world, planning tends to be ad hoc because of the many special-interest groups with their multiple objectives.

More than ambition, more than ability, it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought.

Hyman G. Rickover

To a fair extent the Tyrannosaurus species are the tyrannosaur's of tyrannosaurs; they have taken to an extreme the development of skull size, strength, and power. This and the larger, more forward-pointing mid-upper jaw teeth suggest a more potent wounding ability than the albertosaur's. The stoutness of Tyrannosaurus relative to albertosaurs is readily apparent in the skeletal restorations. They are not as graceful, but they have a well-proportioned, majestic attractiveness of their own.

Gregory Scott Paul

O eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity! You are my God; to you I sigh by day and by night. And when I first knew you, you raised me up so that I could see that there was something to see and that I still lacked the ability to see it. And you beat back the weakness of my sight, blazing upon me with your rays, and I trembled in love and in dread...

Augustine of Hippo

There's something unnatural about a woman finding babies or, more specifically, conversation about babies, boring. They'll think she's bitter, jealous, lonely. But she's also bored of everybody telling her how lucky she is, what with all that sleep and all that freedom and spare time, the ability to go on dates or head off to Paris at a moments notice. It sounds like they're consoling her, and she resents this and feels patronized by it.

David Nicholls (writer)

The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man's ability to invent which has made human society what it is.

The portrayal of Senator Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren't cowering in fear during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation's ability to defend itself while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy's name. Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis.

I believe every person has the ability to achieve something important, and with that in mind I regard everyone as special. A manager should feel this way about people, but it's an attitude that can't be faked. You've got to be honestly convinced that every human being is important.