Motivational Quotes

Ability

A genius can't be forced; nor can you make an ape an alderman.

- Somerville, Thomas

Best Quotes about Ability

The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition.

Ruskin, John

Life has been compared to a race, but the allusion improves by observing, that the most swift are usually the least manageable and the most likely to stray from the course. Great abilities have always been less serviceable to the possessors than moderate ones.

Goldsmith, Oliver

Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do the work.

Pollard, John G.

I thought he was a young man of promise, but it appears he is a young man of promises. [Speaking Of Winston Churchill]

Balfour, Arthur James

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

Newman, John Henry

Martyrdom... is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

George Bernard Shaw

The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Every person is responsible for all the good within the scope of his abilities, and for no more, and none can tell whose sphere is the largest.

Hamilton, Gail

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

I have learnt that I am me, that I can do the things that, as one might put it, me can do, but I cannot do the things that me would like to do.

Christie, Agatha

11.

Man cannot live by incompetence alone.

Peter, Laurence J.

12.

No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort.

Ruskin, John

13.

As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

14.

Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.

Malcolm Forbes

15.

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

Whitton, Charlotte

16.

Nerds don't just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity.

Paul Graham

17.

It is a great ability to be able to conceal one's ability.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

18.

Others have done it before me. I can, too.

Faunce, Corporal John

19.

Be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved or untrained to stand the test.

Daniel Akst

20.

He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

Thoreau, Henry David

21.

The boy was as useless as rubber lips on a woodpecker.

Pitts, Earl

22.

People are so constituted that everybody would rather undertake what they see others do, whether they have an aptitude for it or not.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.

Shaw, George Bernard

24.

All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one...characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers.

25.

To know how to hide one's ability is great skill.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

26.

Wicked people are always surprised to find ability in those that are good.

Vauvenargues, Marquis De

27.

Just do what you do best.

Auerbach, Red

28.

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.

Wooden, John

30.

There is something that is much more scarce, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.

Half, Robert

31.

The Army has carried the American ... ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability.

Tom Lehrer

32.

Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

33.

The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows; it is what a man or woman is able to do that counts.

Washington, Booker T.

34.

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.

Carnegie, Andrew

35.

God does not ask about our ability, but our availability.

36.

It is a fine thing to have ability, but the ability to discover ability in others is the true test.

Hubbard, Elbert

37.

Our work is the presentation of our capabilities.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.

Colton, Charles Caleb

39.

Certainly we're not satisfied with just winning games. We've been playing some pretty good hockey, but we think we can play much better.

Lemieux, Mario

40.

Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing.

Holmes, John Andrew

41.

Analyzing what you haven't got as well as what you have is a necessary ingredient of a career.

Moore, Grace

42.

The question Who ought to be boss? is like as Who ought to be the tenor in the quartet? Obviously, the man who can sing tenor.

Ford, Henry

43.

Not many men have both good fortune and good sense.

Livy, Titus

44.

There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.