Quotes & Sayings About Ability

Ability is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of solemnity. — Ambrose Bierce

The ability to love is the ability to be hurt. The ability to love deeply is the ability to be hurt deeply. But, without love, what meaning does life have? — Ray Grace

I'm not talking about the blood ecstasy. I'm talking about my being able to fill that emotion void she has. You know her as well as I do, maybe better. She aches with it. She needs to be accepted for who she is so badly. And I was able to do that. Do you know good that felt? To be able to show someone that, yes, you are someone worth sacrificing for? That you like them for their faults and that you respect them for their ability to rise above them? — Kim Harrison

If the quality of my Christianity lies in my ability to be more inclusive than the next pastor, things get tricky because I will always, always encounter people - intersex people, Republicans, criminals, Ann Coulter, etc. - whom I don't want in the tent with me. Always. I only really want to be inclusive of some kinds of people and not of others. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The church is in the hope business. We, of all people, ought to be known most for our hope because our hope is founded on something deeper than human ability or wishful thinking. — John Ortberg

A writer can't just be well-educated or good at research; to build a living, breathing world with interesting characters, you have to write from the gut. I'm not saying you have to live your life like a fantasy adventure. The trick is the ability to synthesize your own everyday experiences into your fiction. Infuse your characters with believable emotions and motivations. Infuse your world with rich sensory detail. For that you have to be in touch with your own existence and your own soul, the dark and the light of it. — Lynn Flewelling

Love is a courageous device, it gives you the ability to see things in a positive way. Happy Valentines Day. — Euginia Herlihy

Hardness," I was learning, was the supreme virtue among recon Marines. The greatest compliment one could pay to another was to say he was hard. Hardness wasn't toughness, nor was it courage, although both were part of it. Hardness was the ability to face an overwhelming situation with aplomb, smile calmly at it, and then triumph through sheer professional pride. — Nathaniel Fick

I love you. As the same value, as the same expression, with the same pride and the same meaning as I love my work, my mills, my Metal, my hours at a desk, at a furnace, in a laboratory, in an ore mine, as I love my ability to work, as I love the act of sight and knowledge, as I love the action of my mind when it solves a chemical equation or grasps a sunrise, as I love the things I've made and the things I've felt, as *my* product, as *my* choice, as a shape of my world, as my best mirror, as the wife I've never had, as that which makes all the rest of it possible: as my power to live. — Ayn Rand

By comparison, the Integrated Human model of human nature, in addition to the two elements of our previous model, includes: A conscious analytic system, known as the slow brain (where logic resides) A subconscious intuitive system, or fast brain The full range of motivational drives (of which the drive to acquire is only one) Basic ideas of moral behavior, or moral intuitions Distinguishing characteristics, or personality traits Together, these elements of our nature provide all of the fundamental functions necessary for living life as a complete, Integrated Human - and they are the springboard for the development of leadership character. As our research data has shown, the ability to leverage all of these areas influence leadership's ability to achieve positive organizational outcomes. — Fred Kiel

I think that I have never had the confidence to really aggressively get behind myself, and so what I do tends to be - I don't want to say 'sheepish,' but there is a sheepish quality to my ability to toot my own horn. I'm very Midwestern in that way. So I just do what I like to do, and what I think I do well is not very loud, necessarily. — Kathryn Erbe

Ability to persevere begins with you, the individual. However, change is rarely easy. In fact, sometimes it is downright formidable. — Paul G. Stoltz

The coldest most rational scientific madness is also the most intolerable. But when a man has acquired a certain ability to subsist, even rather scantily, in a certain niche with the help of a few grimaces, he must either keep at it or resign himself to dying the death of a guinea pig. Habits are acquired more quickly than courage, especially the habit of filling one's stomach. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

I've always sort of admired and respected one's ability to be comfortable with other people's discomfort or, you know, their being comfortable making other people uncomfortable. — Timothy Olyphant

We all have insecurities, and the thing that makes them crippling is that we all have the ability to blow them up into such huge issues in our minds, that we might as well have a facial deformity. It keeps us from really going out there and living our lives, and forgetting about hating yourself and just experiencing the world around you. — Christina Ricci

Nature distributes her favors unequally. — George Sand

Don't ever ask a player to do something he doesn't have the ability to do. He'll just question your ability as a coach, not his as an athlete. — Lou Holtz

Leadership is the ability to help people and organizations surpass themselves. — Mark Sanborn

I got on with Louis from the word go. We're very similar and I like the fact that he has this ability to be nice to everyone while living totally for the moment. It puts a smile on your face when you see someone like that. I feel I can tell him anything, and I felt like that straight away. He can be really funny one minute, but if someone has a problem he can go into serious mode straight away and he gives really good advice. — One Direction

Technique and ability alone do not get you to the top; it is the willpower that is the most important. This willpower you cannot buy with money or be given by othersit rises from your heart. — Junko Tabei

The question is what will Mitt Romney do as president if his policy is simply to be hands off and let the government be made so small it can be drowned in a bathtub. In the 21st century global economy, no state alone has the ability to compete against China. — Jennifer Granholm

There's a reason why people shouldn't talk at four in the morning. Exhaustion eliminates the ability to lie. It demolishes the ability to tiptoe around the truth. Emotions are too exposed and real. Heightened to the point of explosion. — Katie McGarry

This powerful question - "Am I standing in my power or am I trying to please another?" - challenges us to believe in ourselves and make the daring choice to trust in our innate ability to know what's in our highest and best interest. — Debbie Ford

Your ability to work with others on a complex task is a critical skill for advancement at work. — Brian Tracy

What made America great was her ability to transform her own dream into hope for all mankind. America did not tell the millions of men and women who came from every country in the world and who -- with their hands, their intelligence and their heart -- built the greatest nation in the world: 'Come, and everything will be given to you.' She said: 'Come, and the only limits to what you'll be able to achieve will be your own courage and your own talent. — Nicolas Sarkozy

Anything that gets in the way of my focus to create gets cut out of my life. It's not easy. Sometimes it's family. Sometimes it's friends. Sometimes it's the ability to have a relationship. — John Zorn

In an imperialist racist patriarchal society that supports and condones oppression, it is not surprising that men and women judge their worth, their personal power, by their ability to oppress others. — Bell Hooks

My ability to function effectively will not affect my ability to serve as commander-in-chief. — Michele Bachmann

The conductor of an orchestra doesn't make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful. — Benjamin Zander

The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking. — Mortimer J. Adler

People's ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time. — W.G. Sebald

You have the ability to find all the answers
if you let yourself do so. — Heather Graham

Flashes of my past lives kept crawling across my vision. I had Akima's laugh, Eve's blind ability to love, and Marrah's unwavering belief in family. I was all of these women and none of them. Their souls carried along inside of me but unmistakable from my own.
I saw their lives in pieces, their triumphs and sorrows, loved ones gained and lost. They were all different yet somehow the same. We were sisters and daughters, lovers and wives.
Pacey O'Brien-Lilith — Ashley Jeffery

That which had made Helmholtz so uncomfortably aware of being himself and all alone was too much ability. What the two men shared was the knowledge that they were individuals. But whereas the physically defective Bernard had suffered all his life from the consciousness of being separate, it was only quite recently that, grown aware of his mental excess, Helmholtz Watson had also become aware of his difference from the people who surrounded him. This Escalator-Squash champion, this indefatigable lover (it was said that he had had six hundred and forty different girls in under four years), this admirable committee man and best mixer had realized quite suddenly that sport, women, communal activities were only, so far as he was concerned, second bests. Really, and at the bottom, he was interested in something else. But in what? In what? — Aldous Huxley

Some people are known, they have the platform and presence, but still remain irrelevant. They know you and what you do, but they don't need you or your offering. I see too many people with a platform but without substance, again this is not sustainable. Lack of substance can only relegate your talent or skill towards the league of the mediocre, if at all you become much by superficial branding then you will become the best of the worst. You don't have what it takes but you depend on your ability to sell substandard offerings to the market. It will not last for long, but quickly become irrelevant. — Archibald Marwizi

The Senate Majority Leader has the unilateral ability to stand up and say, 'If you defy Congress, if you defy the Constitution, if you defy the American people, none of your nominees will be confirmed.' — Ted Cruz

I believe in discipline. You can forgive incompetence. You can forgive lack of ability. But one thing you cannot ever forgive is lack of discipline. — Forrest Gregg

Because we tend to equate intelligence with language
particularly the ability to use language to think and communicate abstractions
it is natural to conclude that animals are, on the whole, a lot less intelligent than we are. — Linda Bender

What does it mean to be human, to continue to live as human, to remain _faithful_ to the Divine while living in a cultural, sociogeopoltical, and religious world where power disparity between/among humans based on religious world where power disparity between/among humans based on their nationality, citizenship, gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, religion and so forth still prevails? The act of _theologizing_ for me involves responding to these questions and stimulating the practice of liberating and enlarging human possibility in our daily reality. — Namsoon Kang

Well, basically there are two sorts of opera," said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. "There's your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like "Oh oh oh, I am dyin', oh I am dyin', oh oh oh, that's what I'm doin'", and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes "Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!", although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely. — Terry Pratchett

If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension ... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Has the mathematical abilities of a Clydesdale. — David Letterman

I will know that only those with inferior ability can always be at their best, and I am not inferior. There will be days when I must constantly struggle against forces which would tear me down. Those such as despair and sadness are simple to recognize but there are others which approach with a smile and the hand of friendship and they can also destroy me. Against them, too, I must never relinquish control - — Og Mandino

I wanted the focus to be on my ability as a singer and as an entertainer - not on my private life. — Adam Lambert

I think as a filmmaker and as a director, you shortchange yourself if you inhibit the ability of your actor to bring their own personal experiences to the characters. — Joe Carnahan

I told Seven the Bartender that true love is felonious.

"Not if they're over eighteen," he said, shutting the till of the cash register.

By then the bar itself had become an appendage, a second torso holding up my first. "You take someone's breath away," I stressed. "You rob them of the ability to utter a single word." I tipped the neck of the empty liquor bottle toward him. "You steal a heart."

He wiped up in front of me with a dishrag. "Any judge would toss that case out on its ass."

"You'd be surprised."

Seven spread the rag out on the brass bar to dry. "Sounds like a misdemeanor, if you ask me."

I rested my cheek on the cool, damp wood. "No way," I said. "Once you're in, it's for life. — Jodi Picoult

...my ability to trust had been shattered into splinters, its fragmented shards slicing through every darkened recess of my mind, his absolution won my over all the more. — Jake Wood

My negotiation skills are are on par with George Bush's reading ability. And just like Dubya, every time I've tried to put forth an effort, I am reminded that my only true strength lies in drinking. — Chelsea Handler

In the matter of dress one should always keep below one's ability. — Baron De Montesquieu

Football was never my life. The guys [and] the relationships were my life. I have an ability to relate to damn near everybody. — John Riggins

Kindness is the ability to love someone in such a way that she will remember your kindness for the rest of her life. — Debasish Mridha

Nine Principles Never have a wicked heart. Train not by thought, but by practice. Learn a wide variety of arts and skills, and do not fix on only one. Know not only your own techniques but also those of many others. Find out rationally what is an advantage and what is a disadvantage. Foster an intuitive ability to judge all things. Feel an essence that you cannot see on the surface. Pay attention to the very smallest of phenomena. (Everything takes its own course, and sometimes we get unexpected results.) Do nothing in vain, for the energy and time we have is limited. — Kazumi Tabata

Our growing ability to eliminate the slow-moving aspects of entertainment and go hopping from one peak to another is not without cost. Stand-up comics, movie-makers and others who earn their living entertaining no longer "waste" time with setups and plot development, lest we reach for the remote and click them off our screen. The result is a loss of subtlety, anticipation and nuance and, in the process, a coarsening of our discourse. — William Raspberry

The displacement of scripted series by reality programming continues to be a severe obstacle to a working actor's ability to earn a living. — Alan Rosenberg

Funding that is focused on the ability to diagnose diseases precisely will just have inestimable value because that's the gate through which precision medicine has to go. Unless you can diagnose the disease precisely, care has to remain in the hands of expensive institutions and expensive caregivers. — Clayton Christensen

Words when spoken out loud for the sake of performance are music. They have rhythm and pitch and timbre and volume. These are the properties of music and music has the ability to find us and move us and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can't. — Josiah Bartlett

The major problem in our lives is to decide and clarify our responsibilities. To truly be committed to a life of honesty, love and discipline, we must be willing to commit ourselves to reality. This commitment, according to Peck, "requires the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual self-examination." Such an ability requires a good relationship with oneself. This is precisely what no shame-based person has. In fact, a toxically shamed person has an adversarial relationship with himself. Toxic shame - the shame that binds us - is a core part of neurotic and character disordered syndromes of behavior. — John Bradshaw

I swallowed and seemed to lose my ability to speak as I took in the Adonis standing before me. I wanted to smack that cocky smile right off his face, though - his — Penelope Ward

Where does my body end and an invader start? And cancer, a tumor, is something you grow out of your own tissue. How does that happen? Where does medical ability end and start? — Dave DeBronkart

Very often we see coaches who have not been successful being recycled, instead of looking to a new face or a new name who has demonstrated the ability to handle the job. — Lynn Swann

World is sensation. We drift in an ocean of sensory stimuli: motion, color, texture, shape, heat, cold, natural symphonies of sound, an infinite number of scents, tastes beyond the human ability to catalogue. Nothing but sensation endures. Living things all die. Great cities do not last. — Dean Koontz

I've seen guys come along with more ability - they've been faster or bigger or stronger - but they never worked hard to develop themselves. Sometimes I've wondered what I could have done with their talent. On the other hand, the tag that I was too small and slow made me work hard. — Steve Largent

We want to not only show respect to our people, in the same way, we want to show respect to everyone we meet in life, we also want to respect their humanity, what it is that makes us human, which is our ability to think and feel - we have to respect that humanity in the way we design the work, so that the work enables their very human characteristics to flourish. — Michael Bremer

Talent (a natural way of thinking, feeling, or behaving) x Investment (time spent practicing, developing your skills, and building your knowledge base) = Strength (the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance) — Tom Rath

The difference between people who believe they have books inside of them and those who actually write books is sheer cussed persistence - the ability to make yourself work at your craft, every day - the belief, even in the face of obstacles, that you've got something worth saying. — Jennifer Weiner

I never really understood that massive collaboration involving hundreds of people is what makes movies possible, and it's also why I would agree that curiosity is not the most important human trait; the urge to collaborate is. Heck ... only we have the ability to cooperate to make like online communities and space telescopes and imaginariums and movies. So the great thrill of this whole experience [my novel being made into a movie] for me was ..seeing humanity do what it's best at, which ultimately is not competing but cooperating. — John Green

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

Fame is hollow. It amplifies what is there. If there is any self-doubt, or hatred, or lack of ability to connect with people, fame will magnify it. — Alanis Morissette

Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn't diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished. — Sally Mann

Which natural gift would you most like to possess? The ability to master other languages (which would have hugely enhanced the scope of these answers).
How would you like to die? Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around).
What do you most dislike about your appearance? The way in which it makes former admirers search for neutral words. — Christopher Hitchens

Whatever notoriety Fall Out Boy used to have prevents me from having the ability to start over from the bottom again. — Patrick Stump

NINA: ... what's important is ... the ability to endure. To be able to bear one's cross and have faith. I have faith, and it's not so painful now, and when I think of my vocation, I'm not afraid of life. — Anton Chekhov

And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us. — Atul Gawande

They'd get that back; when children no longer lived in fear and privation, the ability to hope was one of the first things to return. From — Mercedes Lackey

I believe that access to a university education should be based on the ability to learn, not what people can afford. I think there is no more nauseating a sight than politicians pulling up the ladder of opportunity behind them. — Charles Kennedy

Cosmopolitanism seeks a _we_ that does not rely on the exclusion of _others_ but, instead, recognizes and confirms each other as part of the planetary _we_. The cosmopolitan _we_ is not grounded in a monolithic sameness but in a constant alterity and _ethical singularity_ of each individual human person regardless of one's national origin and belonging, religious affiliation, gender, race and ethnicity, class ability, or sexuality. — Namsoon Kang

Shizuo Heiwajima, the strongest man in Ikebukuro: I just want the ability to control myself. That's the kind of strength I want. — Ryohgo Narita

As more ad spending shifts online, the ability to have expertise and to innovate quickly will become critical. — Kara Swisher

And isn't that the tragedy of love, it's utter and complete deceit, that you can only be true in it, that you only wish to reveal your full truth to the one you love, with no frills and no lies, that you want to be loved as you are? That you wish to be loved for your truth, and not your ability to hide it? — Omair Ahmad

He leaned back, appalled at himself. She was a ***damn dose of truth serum. Things were falling out of his mouth as though his ability to sensor had short-circuited. — Laura Spinella

Get the heat and emotion out worry, and put cold, ruthless scrutiny onto the problem, and worry loses its power. When we are worried and filled with apprehension, we become panicky and are likely to see only gloom and failure. There isn't any situation so bad that it won't become a lot better when you think rationally - and spiritually - about it. God gives you the ability to think rationally about things by filling you with peace and faith. — Norman Vincent Peale

In life, satisfaction is experienced when activities are brought to a state of completion. Loss of energy and loss of control are functions of incompletion. The result of completing things releases one's ability to create. Prioritize any items that need to be completed, set a completion date, then do it. — William Arthur Ward

On a good team there are no superstars. There are great players who show they are great players by being able to play with others as a team. They have the ability to be superstars, but if they fit into a good team, they make sacrifices, they do things necessary to help the team win. What the numbers are in salaries or statistics don't matter; how they play together does. — Red Holzman

Tips can make someone a better writer but not necessarily a good writer. That's a larger package - a matter of character. Golfing is more than keeping the left arm straight. Every good golfer is a complex engine that runs on ability, ego, determination, discipline, patience, confidence, and other qualities that are self-taught. So it is with writers and all creative artists. If their values are solid their work is likely to be solid. — William Zinsser

Usually we regard as meaningful that which can be expressed, and as meaningless that which cannot be expressed. Yet, the equation of the meaningful and the expressible ignores a vast realm of human experience, and is refuted by our sense of the ineffable which is an awareness of an allusiveness to meaning without the ability to express it. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

To simplify is about enhancing our ability to focus on things that really matter, to deliberately choose our priorities, and to refuse to let unimportant things take over the things of real importance. — Carolyn J. Rasmus

Conventional measures of mental ability, such as intelligence tests and scholarship, show some of the very highest records belong to INFP and INFJ types, who relegate thinking to last place or next to last. The preference for thinking appears to have far less intellectual effect than the preference for intuition, even in some technical fields, such as scientific research, where its influence was expected to be most important. — Isabel Briggs Myers

The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability to indicate the right tempo. — Richard Wagner

I have two things going for me. The first is the fidelity to my principles, and the other is my ability to show up for the fight every day. Period that. — Ron Dellums

I think some bands thrive on the idea of changing instruments. When they're off their real instrument, the ability to go very far from the original idea is reduced. — Tom Waits

A leader should never risk their ability to make a difference by making an unnecessary point. — Andy Stanley

Dancing allows me to explore myself in so many ways, to learn about my limitations and strengths, my ability to cope with adversity and to go farther than I thought I could. You find out what you're made of. — Andrew Asnes

The antigovernment paradigm blinds us to possibilities that lie outside its ideological litmus tests and prevents us from creating new networks of cooperation that can restore economic growth, bring economic opportunity to more people and places, and increase our ability to lead the world to a better future. — Bill Clinton

I believe that every man can multiply his own ability by almost constant wordless realization of his unity with his Source. I have, myself, made that feeling so much a part of me that I actually feel myself to be an extension of the Source; that my works are not my own, but interpretations of this Source. — Walter Russell

Luckily, what you trade off in not being part of the comic book canon and not having some literature that you can use to your benefit, in terms of figuring out who you are, you gain in the ability to just be whoever you want to be. — Dallas Roberts

We don't really have the ability to enforce the law with respect to illegal work in this country in a way that's truly effective ... We haven't been able to require every employer to enter a system in which they check the work status of their employees and determine whether they're legal, and without that, we don't really have the ability to enforce the law with respect to illegal work in this country in a way that's truly effective. And that would be the single greatest additional weapon we could use if we're serious about tackling this problem. — Michael Chertoff

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

You must define success as making the complete effort to maximize your ability, skills, and potential in whatever circumstances - good or bad - may exist. — John Wooden

What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. — Thucydides

He was blessed with the ability to admire the unlovely. Or, I should say, he was blessed with the inability to feel there is a difference between lovely and un-. — Alexandra Horowitz