Ability Quotes

• Mildly talented in a variety of ways but with no genuine ability in any one field, she was like me, the perennial hapless self-amused dilettante, half-worried by the slippage of time but determined to enjoy failure anyway.
  Edward Abbey  
• Just do what you do best.
  Red Auerbach
• Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.
  Francis Bacon 
• I thought he was a young man of promise, but it appears he is a young man of promises. Speaking Of Winston Churchill
  Arthur Balfour
• Knowing what you can not do is more important than knowing what you can do. In fact, that's good taste.
  Lucille Ball
• 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
  Napoleon Bonaparte 
• Ability is of little account without opportunity.
  Napoleon Bonaparte
• No letters after your name are ever going to be a total guarantee of competence any more than they are a guarantee against fraud. Improving competence involves continuing professional development ... That is the really crucial thing, not just passing an examination.
  Colette Bowe 
• What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
  Thomas Carlyle
• No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.
  Andrew Carnegie 
• When it is a question of God's almighty Spirit, never say, I can't.
  Oswald Chambers
• 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.
  Agatha Christie 
• Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
  Marcus Tullius Cicero
• Ability without honor is useless.
  Marcus Tullius Cicero 
• I add this, that rational ability without education has oftener raised man to glory and virtue, than education without natural ability.
  Marcus Tullius Cicero
• Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.
  Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
• To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.
  Charles Caleb Colton
• The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.
  Thomas Alva Edison 
• People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.
  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.
  Ralph Waldo Emerson 
• The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.
  Desiderius Erasmus
• 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.
  Douglas Everett 
• When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.
  William Faulkner
• Others have done it before me. I can, too.
  Corporal John Faunce 
• A man must not deny his manifest abilities, for that is to evade his obligations.
  William Feather
• Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.
  Malcolm Stevenson Forbes
• Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right!
  Henry Ford
• 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.
  Henry Ford
• It is all one to me if a man comes from Sing Sing Prison or Harvard. We hire a man, not his history.
  Henry Ford
• As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.James A. Froude
• I know I have the ability to do so much more than just stand in front of the camera the rest of my life.
  Jennie Garth
• The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
  Edward Gibbon
• Our work is the presentation of our capabilities.
  Johann von Goethe
• People are so constituted that everybody would rather undertake what they see others do, whether they have an aptitude for it or not.
  Johann von Goethe
• The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.
  Johann von Goethe
• The really unhappy person is the one who leaves undone what they can do, and starts doing what they don't understand; no wonder they come to grief.
  Johann von Goethe
• 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.
  Oliver Goldsmith
• Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment.
• Baltasar GracianThe Oracle
• We don't know who we are until we see what we can do.
  Martha Grimes
• There is something that is much more scarce, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.
  Robert Half
• 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.
  Gail Hamilton
• Men are in numberless instances qualified for certain things, for no other reason than because they are qualified for nothing else.
  William Hazlitt
• A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
  Robert A. Heinlein
• from Time Enough for Love: Notebooks of Lazarus Long
• People differ not only in their ability to do but also in their 'will to do'.
  Paul Hersey
• 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.
  John Andrew Holmes
• 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.
  Oliver Wendell Holmes
• It is a fine thing to have ability, but the ability to discover ability in others is the true test.
  Elbert Hubbard
• It's pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious.
  Kin Hubbard
• Being competent means the ability to control and operate the things in the environment and the environment itself.
  L. Ron Hubbard
• The differences between a competent person and an incompetent person are demonstrated in his environment (surroundings).
  L. Ron Hubbard