Mastered It Quotes & Sayings

I now view life as a complex and unpredictable affair that cannot be mastered. It can be embraced. It can be negotiated more or less skillfully. But mastered? Not a chance. — Gary Hayden

You're afraid of it because it's stronger than you, you hate it because you're afraid of it, you love it because you can't master it. You can only love something that refuses to be mastered. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Grammar is to a writer what anatomy is to a sculptor, or the scales to a musician. You may loathe it, it may bore you, but nothing will replace it, and once mastered it will support you like a rock. — B. J. Chute

In fact the "mask" theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism", and Robert Jackall, in "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers", refer repeatedly to the "masks" that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces.
Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to "get in the face" of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me. — Barbara Ehrenreich

One thing people often want me to talk about is my public love life. When it comes to my love life, the perception seems as though I am a player. But that's not true. Love is something I am still learning. It's just an obstacle that I haven't yet mastered. I think that's my biggest hurdle in life. — Chris Brown

I think it is just the way he has changed the game overall and his own game because there are so many situations he has faced. He is now competing mostly against himself, like most great cricketers do. I think he has mastered all of them. The only challenge he has is to beat himself every time he walks out there because he has done almost everything. — Kumar Sangakkara

Very private people have mastered the art of telling you little about themselves but doing it in such a way you think you know a lot. — Anonymous

Everybody gets plagued by indifference and monotony. The truth is, there are concepts that are constantly being repeated in this world, since the beginning of time, but it doesn't seem like any of us have mastered them. So my advice is to keep going with the topic, which usually has to do with redemption, love, compassion, freedom, injustice, perversion, divinity, the diabolical ... keep going with your thoughts, and your heart, and push them through to transformation. — Kelly Cutrone

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it. — George Bernard Shaw

Fear in the biblical sense ... includes being afraid of someone, but it extends to holding someone in awe, being controlled or mastered by people, worshipping other people, putting your trust in people, or needing people. — Edward T. Welch

It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future. — Clay Shirky

Because speaking while watching things has always been difficult for me, learning to drive a car and talk at the same time was a tough one, but I mastered it. — John Elder Robison

Since ancient times, people have bowed down to idols in the appearance of humility and contrition. But their goal wasn't to be mastered by the idol. People worship to get things. We choose idols in part because we believe that they will give us what we want. The god of drugs brings fearlessness; the god of sex promises pleasure and intimacy; the god of wealth holds out power and influence. We can feel miserable about ourselves because we want to be great, at least at something, and we are not feeling very great. Like the prophets of Baal, we are arrogant enough to believe that we can manipulate the idol - whether by cutting or some other form of works righteousness - so it will relent and give us what we want. — Edward T. Welch

The man who has acquired the habit of study, though for only one hour every day in the year, and keeps to the one thing studied till it is mastered, will be startled to see the way he has made at the end of a twelvemonth. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The theory of medicine, therefore, presents what is useful in thought, but does not indicate how it is to be applied in practice-the mode of operation of these principles. The theory, when mastered, gives us a certain kind of knowledge. Thus we say, for example, there are three forms of fevers and nine constitutions. The practice of medicine is not the work which the physician carries out, but is that branch of medical knowledge which, when acquired, enables one to form an opinion upon which to base the proper plan of treatment. — Avicenna

Humans, particularly those influenced by the Judeo-Christian ethic, see themselves as rulers of the earth, an attitude stemming not from divine doctrines, but rather from human interpretation of them. Those governed by such erroneous tenets look upon animals as chattels, organisms that have been divinely created for human use and convenience. But domestic animals are the work of man. The wolf and all other wild beings are the work of nature; they are PURE WILD, gloriously so. This is why a wolf can never be owned; it cannot be mastered. — R.D. Lawrence

We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed - begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I've never mastered it - I only know how true it is; that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life. — Truman Capote

There is another reason ever-single women fare even better than previously married women in later life. They mastered the single life long ago. From structuring social events in a culture that caters to couples, to figuring out how to work and get all the tasks of everyday life accomplished when there may or may not be others readily available to do their unfair share, always-single women have been there, done that. It is not a new or daunting challenge. — Bella DePaulo

Once you have mastered the ten thousand states of mind, it's paranirvana, the absorption into the stillness forever. — Frederick Lenz

To her amazement, she realized that the way of life of these people was nothing more than an indeterminate fiction, casually knotted together at particular points that were used again and again. With four or five remarks, and a couple of facial expressions, she had mastered it with no problem at all. — Gerhard Amanshauser

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger. — Aldous Huxley

As the campaign progressed, Armistead remembered what his parents had taught him: If you never tell a lie, you won't have to remember what you said.
He subsequently developed a perverse respect for politicians who had mastered the art of spin. It was a skill to produce an answer having nothing to do with the question.
He didn't think he was crafty enough to do it. — Rodney Page

A person or team which is not humble cannot get better. This is because they think they already have everything mastered. They think they already have done enough to succeed. They think they already know all of the answers. Once someone has had some success, be it large or small, they frequently get satisfied, even a little lazy. They think the way they worked yesterday was good enough, so they struggle to work hard today. As a result, they stay still as the humble advance. — William James Moore

I grew to understand or really grasp a sense of what the power of being humble is - that becomes a practice. Otherwise you'll be crushed by your fear of being humiliated. It'll control you the rest of your life. I really understood that. I haven't mastered it, I haven't come close to it. — Caroline Myss

The witness is frequent and insistent that God is inherently relational and personal. So God cannot be either received or understood apart from our being personal and realtional as well. That most emphatically excludes the detached intellect as a way of knowing God. It excludes programmatic work as a way of knowing God. It excludes cultivation of the ecstatic and visionary as a way of knowing God. God is not an abstract idea that can be mastered, not an impersonal force that can be used, not a private experience that can be indulged." Eugene Peterson, "Living the Resurrection" (106). — Eugene H. Peterson

I also mixed David Bowie's Young Americans album in 5.1 earlier this year and it will be available very soon. Even the original stereo mixes have been re-mastered and sound amazingly good, better than ever, in fact! — Tony Visconti

I guess I don't really know any other way to do it, it just feels like the natural way to do things for me. Like - if I'm writing a song - it has to have some sort of value. Or it only has some kind of value to me, if it's something really personal. It has to mean something to me. I guess it is a little uncomfortable, or it's a little embarrassing sometimes, to know that stuff that honest is out there. But, when I hand off the thing, when it's totally done and mastered and sent, I kinda feel like it doesn't belong to me anymore. — Panda Bear

Each new step into his new human existence is frightening. It always means to give up a secure state, which was relatively known, for one which is new, which one has not yet mastered. Undoubtedly, if the infant could think at the moment of the severance of the umbilical cord, he would experience the fear of dying. A loving fate protects us from this first panic. But at any new step, at any new stage of our birth, we are afraid again. We are never free from two conflicting tendencies: one to emerge from the womb, from the animal form of existence into a more human existence, from bondage to freedom; another, to return to the womb, to nature, to certainty and security. — Erich Fromm

She'd never mastered the talent for apologizing, but she appreciated it in other people. — Terry Pratchett

The practice of discernment is part of higher consciousness. Discernment is not just a step up from judgment. In life's curriculum, it is the opposite of judgment. Through judgment a man reveals what he needs to confront and learn. Through discernment, one reveals what he has mastered. — Glenda Green

She alone is the happy woman who has learned to extract happiness, not from ideal conditions, but from the actual ones about her. The woman who has mastered the secret will not wait for ideal surroundings; she will not wait until next year, next decade, until she gets rich, until she can travel abroad ... but she will make the most out of life today, where she is. Paradise is here or nowhere. You must take your joy with you or you will never find it. — Orison Swett Marden

Our politics and science have never mastered the fact that people need more than to understand their obligation to one another and to the earth; they need also the feeling of such obligation, and the feeling can come only within the patterns of familiarity. A nation of urban nomads, such as we have become, may simply be unable to be enough disturbed by its destruction of the ecological health of the land, because the people's dependence on the land, though it has been expounded to them over and over again in general terms, is not immediate to their feelings. — Wendell Berry

Basque is one of the world's more alarming languages. Only a handful of adult foreigners, they say, have ever managed to learn it. The Devil tried once and mastered only three words - profanities, I assume. — Jan Morris

It hit a raw nerve to think that her relationship, or whatever this was between her and Drake, was following some guideline or schedule he performed by rote, regardless of who his current woman was.
Would any woman do for him? Did Evangeline's face blur among the many who'd come before her? Did she stand out? She supposed she was lucky that he at least remembered her name and hadn't called her by another woman's name. She'd likely stab him with a kitchen knife if that ever happened. — Maya Banks

Generally, it's all of this subconscious stuff. I didn't even know what Lizzobangers was about until it was mastered and I got to listen to it. — Lizzo

You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Bernard Shaw phrased the experience very admirably: "When we learn something, it feels at first as if we have lost something." It is so, for instance, with a new stroke at tennis. Our old stroke had been a pretty incompetent affair, of the sort to make a professional laugh. But it had been ours, we were used to it, all our muscles were in the habit of it. The new stroke is doubtless better, but we are not in the way of it, we cannot do anything with it, and all the joy goes out of tennis - but only until we have mastered the new way. Then, quite suddenly, we find that the whole game is a new experience. — Frank Sheed

To live only for some unknown future is superficial. It is like climbing a mountain to reach the peak without experiencing its sides. The sides of the mountain sustain life, not the peak. This is where things grow, experience is gained, and technologies are mastered. The importance of the peak lies only in the fact that it defines the sides. So I went on towards the top, but always experiencing the sides. I had a long way to go but I was in no hurry. I went in little steps - just one step after another - but each step towards the top. — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Never did I fight for the poor. I fought against the rich
which of course isn't at all the same thing. In any case, the fighting was the point. You don't fight to become free
to fight is to be free. A man with a gun and the will to use it can't be mastered, he can only be killed. — James Carlos Blake

But with carefully chosen keyboard macros to activate it, Mass Copy is quick, convenient, and powerful. Most users who have mastered it depend heavily on it. That certainly includes me. — Robert Patterson

My philosophy is that once you get people compelled enough to sit down and play the game, the whole way you make the game successful is by giving them enough unique ways to do things. First, let them deal with pulling levers and things like that for a while. Then after they've mastered that, you give them something else to do, like getting through doorways by blasting them down with a cannon Next, you give them a monster-finding quest, followed by logic problems to figure out. You pace it that way. Assorted activities and the diversity of activities are what makes a game rich in my mind. — Richard Garriott

This next nugget of salesmanship cannot be perfected in a single afternoon. However, once you have it mastered, your competition will continuously believe you possess some mystical customer attracting formula — Chris Murray

Denial is a skill I mastered at a young age. Don't think about it. Don't talk about it. Suck it up. Choke it down. — Emma Chase

It's been said that adults spend the first two years of their children's lives trying to make them walk and talk, and the next sixteen years trying to get them to sit down and shut up.
It's the same way with potty training: Most adults spend the first few years of a child's life cheerfully discussing pee and poopies, and how important it is to learn to put your pee-pee and poo-poo in the potty like big people do.
But once children have mastered the art of toilet training, they are immeadiately forbidden to ever talk about poop, pee, toilets and other bathroom-related subjects again. Such things are now considered rude and vulgar, and are no longer rewarded with praise and cookies and juice boxes.
One day you're a superstar because you pooped in the toilet like a big boy, and the next day you're sitting in the principal's office because you said the word "poopy" in American History class (which, if you ask me, is the perfect place to say that word). — Dav Pilkey

We had forgotten the art of using silence to convey emotions in our films and that's what you seem to have mastered. You've used silence to great advantage in the film. It's brilliant. — Amitabh Bachchan

Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects, see how one complements, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they form a stepladder upon which you have climbed up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The aim is never to become a master of the Word, but to be mastered by it. — D. A. Carson

I've never played,' said von Igelfeld.
'Nor I,' said Unterholzer. 'Chess, yes. Tennis no.'
'But that's no reason not to play,' von Igelfeld added quickly. 'Tennis, like any activity, can be mastered if one knows the principles behind it. In that respect it must be like language. The understanding of simple rules produces an understanding of a language. What could be simpler? — Alexander McCall Smith

We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature's most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation
the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered
is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture. — Marjorie Garber

It takes great skill to tell a compelling story in under 60 seconds. These five directors have mastered the format, using their talent, craft and imagination to provide us with some of the most innovative filmmaking out there today. — Michael Apted

Something he must read, when he was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the talk of men ... it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid ... knowledge seemed to him a very superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversations of his elders he had apparently got already more than was necessary for mature life. — George Eliot

When what we believe we've mastered is no longer predictable we're not fine. The world suddenly is a very scary place. It loses its charm. — Patricia Cornwell

Anna had been preparing herself for this meeting, had thought what she would say to him, but she did not succeed in saying anything of it; his passion mastered her. She tried to calm him, to calm herself, but it was too late. His feeling infected her. Her lips trembled so that for a long while she could say nothing. — Leo Tolstoy

He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars. — Jack London

I have started smiling! I've mastered this smirk; it's a smile that isn't a smile. — Victoria Beckham

It is that they learn to think of themselves as characters in the story of God and his people, whose earlier chapters set out characteristic lessons to be mastered by those who find themselves in the later chapters. But the overall point is this: they are in the same story, not a different story which happens to be parallel to another earlier one. — N. T. Wright

Knowing how to tinker with a broken piece of prose until it hums is a source of contentment known by all who have mastered a worthy craft. — Carol Fisher Saller

White Hot Concentration is the unappreciated fruit of hard ligting, especially squats. When your in the squat rack, with a serious amount of weight overhead, your life literally depends on maintaining concentration. You learn to block out the swirling images in the mirror, the obnoxious chatter of the people next to you, the fat drop of sweat running down your nose. Once you've mastered this concentration in the weight room, duplicating it on the race course is relatively easy. Champions have only a few things in common. One weapon they all possess is White Hot Concentration. — Brad Alan Lewis

Even though people are shallow and lots of people prefer scripted fictional heroes to real human beings, they can still be shaken out of it in the presence of someone who is REAL. Your problem is not that you haven't mastered the conversational skills necessary to maintain someone's interest. Your problem is that you've never forced yourself to define exactly who you are and what you love and how you want to live. You've never had to talk about these things passionately. You've never dared to lay yourself bare, without apology. Once you can look someone in the eyes and say, "Here's what really matters to me"? That's what people find attractive, trust me. They want to be with someone who knows himself and gives a shit. That's what's alluring and attractive and irreplaceable, even in this age of smooth make-believe. — Heather Havrilesky

If you have done nothing to feel embarrassed about, don't feel embarrassed. I know this is a tough concept, but it can be mastered. — Melody Beattie

I've taught myself to speak with two different voices and only say certain things around certain people. I've mastered it. — Angie Thomas

I watched him skip down the trail and felt annoyed by all this joy; then I wondered why I couldn't be that joyful. Maybe everything really was attitude. I had mastered self-pity and realized maybe it was time to work on joy. Doesn't the Dalai Lama say happiness is a decision? Pain is inevitable, suffering a choice. Could it be that I simply suffered from a bad attitude? Maybe I needed to try harder to enjoy all of it even if it wasn't exactly fun. — Suzanne Roberts

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered. — Stanley Kubrick

This walking business is overrated: I mastered the art of doing it when I was quite small, and in any case, what are taxis for? — Christopher Hitchens

I began to see my body like an iPad or a car. I would drive it and demand things from it. It had no limits. It was invincible. It was to be conquered and mastered like the Earth herself. — Eve Ensler

In most important ways, leaders of the future will need the traits and capabilities of leaders throughout history: an eye for change and a steadying hand to provide both vision and reassurance that change can be mastered, a voice that articulates the will of the group and shapes it to constructive ends, and an ability to inspire by force of personality while making others feel empowered to increase and use their own abilities. — Rosabeth Moss Kanter

I have finally mastered what to do with the second tennis ball. Having small hands, I was becoming terribly self-conscious about keeping it in a can in the car while I served the first one. I noted some women tucked the second ball just inside the elastic leg of their tennis panties. I tried, but found the space already occupied by a leg. Now, I simply drop the second ball down my cleavage, giving me a chest that often stuns my opponent throughout an entire set. — Erma Bombeck

We already have so much abundance. We truly do. We need not search too far. It is within. The reason we fail to recognize this is because we haven't quite mastered the art of being. For abundance to prevail, we must have LOVE, gratitude, acceptance and compassion. — John Welwood

I re-mastered 'The Conversation' a few years ago for DVD. 'The Conversation' was the first film I edited on a flatbed machine - a KEM editing machine. I've been using Final Cut or the AVID for 12 years now, so I was interested in looking at this film and seeing if I could tell if it had been edited the old way. Truth be told, I couldn't. — Walter Murch

Nate took the sheet. It was covered in the neat, curvy handwriting so many women mastered and men almost never did. The top half was the message, recopied in the same Cyrillic that it had been on the wall. Below it was the translation in English. — Peter Clines

These European White Men, then, with civilization in their blood and in their destiny, crossed the Atlantic and set up a new civilization on a bleak and rock bound coast. It was the White Men who drove north to Alaska and west to California; the men who opened up the tropics and subdued the Arctics; the men who mastered the African Veldts; the men who peopled Australia and seized the gates of the world at Suez, Gibraltar and Panama. — Ben Klassen

We are together. That means I don't look at another woman the way I look at you. I don't touch another woman the way I touch you. I don't feel about any woman the way I feel about you. Got it? Don't ever think I'd throw away what we have for a cheap, meaningless fuck. You either trust me, or you don't. So what's it going to be? -Ronin Black — Lorelei James

It is obvious that the fascist mass pestilence, with its background of thousands of years, cannot be mastered with social measures corresponding to the past three hundred years. The discovery of the natural biological work democracy in international human intercourse is the answer to fascism. This will be no less true even if not one of the living sex-economists, orgone biophysicists or work democrats should live to see its general functioning and its victory over the irrationalism in social life. — Wilhelm Reich

There is no "can't" in martial arts. It is perfectly all right for students to state that they are "still working on it", "have not mastered it yet", or "are trying as best they can" as all of those sentiments reflect willingness and perseverance. It is not all right, on the other hand, to verbally or physically portray reluctance, vacillation, or defect. — Lawrence Kane

The only process you've mastered is the process of elimination, and the only reason you've mastered that is because you can do it in the toilet. — Orson Scott Card

Relativity is a beautiful, irrifutable truth. We must acknowledge that wearing a black belt in jiu jitsu does not make you a black belt in life. In the home, there are black belts who are white belt fathers, and there are white belts who are black belt fathers. This holds true for all areas of life. A black belt does not mean you are successful in life. It does mean that you have mastered this art to an enormous degree, and that the skills you have acquired can be transmuted to a plethora of other activities. It does not mean, however, that you have done this. — Chris Matakas

Life here is probationary. It is man's duty to become the master, not the slave of nature. His appetites are to be controlled and used for the benefit of his health and the prolongation of his life-his passions mastered and controlled for the happiness and blessing of others. — David O. McKay

The blessing in life is when you find the torture you are comfortable with. That's marriage, it's kids, it's work, it's exercise. Find the torture you're comfortable with and you'll do well. You've mastered that, you've mastered life. — Jerry Seinfeld

Few fallacies are more dangerous or easier to fall into than that by which, having read a given book, we assume that we will continue to know its contents permanently, or having mastered a discipline in the past, we assume that we control it in the present. Philosophically speaking, "to learn" is a verb with not legitimate tense. — Robert Grudin

This was not the way to think things out for himself, and that was what he had to do. Take each piece of happening that, by itself, was just a meaningless hurt and find its place in the big picture. Do it over and over and over, because that way one came to understand things, and they hurt less. He had ... come to understand a lot and the knowledge he now held within himself was not made of sharp, separate hurts. It was just one big, heavy sadness. It made him stand very straight, braced against the weight in his heart proudly ... Each bit of knowledge he had gathered, each new hurt he had mastered, made him lift his chin a little higher, hold himself more closely knit and proud, because he had found out all by himself that his pride could be used as a shield to soften and deflect each new blow. His proud, strong body, his still, calm face, was the shield; he had no other weapon against the monsters in this dark tunnel of time that was so much like the shivery, scary part of a story. — Kate Seredy

This is the third night you've kept me up crying. Thought I'd give your mother a rest. Right now you haven't mastered English yet so I thought I'd put this on film for you. I want to show you something. Tony, see that? I built that for you and someday you're going to realize that it represents a lot more than just people's inventions. It represents my life's work. Someday you'll figure it out, and when you do, you'll do even bigger things with your life. I just know it. You're the future. I've created so much in y life, but you know what is the thing I'm proudest of? You. My son. The secret to the future is here! — Alex Irvine

He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval. — Arthur Conan Doyle

We cannot hope to achieve full employment and sustain it until we have mastered inflation. — Denis Healey

Very few people can write in a crowd. This is a very solitary occupation. I have known people more talented than me who never made it. And the primary reason was always that they couldn't stand to be alone for several hours a day. Any writer worth anything has mastered the art. The art of solitude. — Tom Robbins

I have come to the conclusion that rowing alone won't bring top of the line erg scores. The two are really completely different. The motion is, of course, fairly similar to rowing. However moving your own body back and foth on a machine that doesn't move is a challenge that cannot be mastered unless it is trained. Therefore, I believe that people who only row will find it harder to pull scores on the erg that are in the highest percentile. — Xeno Muller

I said he had called them because it was from his mind that we drew them, seeking those who hated him, or at least had reason to. The giant you saw might have mastered the Commonwealth, had Severian not defeated him. The blond woman could not forgive him for bringing her back from death. — Gene Wolfe

I conclude therefore that, fortune being changeful and mankind steadfast in their ways, so long as the two are in agreement men are successful, but unsuccessful when they fall out. For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always, woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her. — Niccolo Machiavelli

My friend had a brilliant idea. This impressed me. It reflected an immense deal of credit on his brain. But when he expressed it,it lost all value, and enjoyed but a commonplace status. My friend blamed this devaluation on the language. "I hate English," he said. So he studied another language. He mastered it so perfectly that there was no room left in his brain for a brilliant idea. Now he has a grudge against words. He refuses to use them. He prefers to shrug or grunt. A new crop of ideas is growing. They show promise of future refinement. — Marvin L. Cohen

These poor people have learned to endure day to day economic agony. It's routine in daily life for them. They are so accustomed to facing economic pain that poverty doesn't hurt them anymore. Extreme negativity in their life drove learning endurance and their accomplishment to endure extreme conditions is 'positivity' they mastered — Sadashivan Nair

Basketball isn't just a sport. It is an art, one that must be mastered to succeed. — Stephen Curry

Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For example, every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it, and consequently a revolutionist. — George Bernard Shaw

Raskolnikov saw in part why Sonia could not bring herself to read to him and the more he saw this, the more roughly
and irritably he insisted on her doing so. He understood only too well how painful it was for her to betray and unveil all
that was her own. He understood that these feelings really were her secret treasure, which she had kept perhaps for
years, perhaps from childhood, while she lived with an unhappy father and distracted step mother crazed by grief, in the midst of starving children and unseemly abuse and reproaches. But at the same time he knew now and knew for
certain that, although it filled her with dread and suffering, yet she had a tormenting desire to read and to read to him that he might hear it, and to read now whatever might come of it! ... He read this in her eyes, he could see it in her intense emotion. She mastered herself, controlled the spasm in her throat and went on reading the eleventh chapter of St.
John. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Once you have mastered the craft, you can use it for whatever purpose you choose. — Hassan Fathy

Every job is different. I don't think that I've ever had that wonderful feeling when you've finished a job or where you feel like you've mastered it or sort of nailed it ... You can never be satisfied. If you're satisfied, it's time to retire. — Alfred Molina

Don't be upset," he whispered.
"I couldn't stop it from happening," she said in a plaintive voice.
"You weren't supposed to," he said tenderly. "I was playing with you. Teasing you."
"But I wanted it to last longer. It's our wedding night, and it's already over." Pausing, Beatrix added glumly, "At least my part of it is."
Christopher averted his face, but she could see that he was struggling to contain a laugh. When he had mastered himself, he looked down at her with a slight smile and smoothed her hair back from her face. "I can make you ready again."
Beatrix was quiet for a moment as she evaluated her spent nerves and limp body. "I don't think so," she said. "I feel like a wrung-out kitchen mop."
"I promise to make you ready again," he said, his voice threaded with amusement.
"It will take a long time," Beatrix said, still frowning.
Gathering her into his arms, Christopher crushed his mouth over hers. "I can only hope so. — Lisa Kleypas

A dollar put into a book and a book mastered might change the whole course of a boy's life. It might easily be the beginning of the development of leadership that would carry the boy far in service to his fellow men. — Henry Ford

It was Frankie Lymon all over again," Marvin said. "Only this kid had mastered James Brown's moves. Michael was like Stevie. From the very beginning, he worried me. — David Ritz

A heart sacrifice is not a formula that can be mastered. It is a decision that is intrinsically tied to the personal relationship between us and our God. — Carol Kent

Beyond streamlining operations and introducing cost innovations, a second lever companies can pull to meet their target cost is partnering. In bringing a new product or service to market, many companies mistakenly try to carry out all the production and distribution activities themselves. Sometimes that's because they see the product or service as a platform for developing new capabilities. Other times it is simply a matter of not considering other outside options. Partnering, however, provides a way for companies to secure needed capabilities fast and effectively while dropping their cost structure. It allows a company to leverage other companies' expertise and economies of scale. Partnering includes closing gaps in capabilities through making small acquisitions when doing so is faster and cheaper, providing access to needed expertise that has already been mastered. A — W.Chan Kim

Years ago a friend gave me what he called his 'Formula: How to Know Right from Wrong.' The formula asks four questions based on three verses in 1 Corinthians:
1. '"Everything is permissible for me"
but not everything is beneficial' (1 Corinthians 6:12).
Question 1: Is it helpful
physically, spiritually, and mentally?
2. '"Everything is permissible for me"
but I will not be mastered by anything' (1 Corinthians 6:12). Question 2: Does it bring me under its power?
3. 'Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall' (1 Corinthians 8:13).
Question 3: Does it hurt others?
4. 'So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God' (1 Corinthians 10:31).
Question 4: Does it glorify God? — Jerry Bridges