Ability Quotes

I think the Supreme Court has, as an equal branch of government, the ability to overrule Congress and the president. But I also feel it's the role of the Congress and the president to push back. I mean I think it's important that they are understood as equal branches of government.

My singing ability is zilch.

So far as the object of taxation is to raise a revenue for discharging the debts and defraying the expenses of the community, its operation should be adapted as much as possible to suit the burden with equal hand upon all in proportion with their ability of bearing it without oppression.

Adversity is a good test of our resiliency, our ability to cope, to stand back up, to recover from misfortune. Adversity is a painful pedagogue.

Failure to shed tears is a failure to live life fully. And the one thing that life requires of us all is to live it. Never be embarrassed by your ability to be alive.

To be a super-trader, you'll need an edge to overcome the laws of probability and the uncertainty of the marketplace. That edge comes from information flow, the ability to correct your habits in terms of the market's characteristics, and being able to take risks, cut losses, expand your information network, ferret out ideas, and take recommendations.

When we trust the makers of baby formula more than we do our own ability to nourish our babies, we lose a chance to claim an aspect of our power as women. Thinking that baby formula is as good as breast milk is believing that thirty years of technology is superior to three million years of nature's evolution. Countless women have regained trust in their bodies through nursing their children, even if they weren't sure at first that they could do it. It is an act of female power, and I think of it as feminism in its purest form.

The secret to thriving is the knowledge that we are never simply victims of our bodies. It’s very reassuring to know that we all have within us the ability to heal from anything and go on to live joy-filled lives.

The way to get through anything mentally painful is to take it a little at a time. The mind can't handle dealing with a massive iceberg of pain in front of it, but it can deal with short nuggets that will come to an end. So instead of thinking, Ugh, I've got twenty-four miles to go, focus on making it to the next telephone pole in the distance. Whether you're running twenty or one hundred and twenty miles at a time, the distance has to be tackled mentally and physically one mile at a time. The ability to compartmentalize pain into these small bite sizes is key.

As a coach I think that's one of the things we have to exude: the ability to move on regardless of the result.

By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited... The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

I think that as a playwright, if I detail that environment, then I'm taking away something from them [designers]. I'm taking away their creativity and their ability to have input themselves, not just to follow what the playwright has written. So I do a minimum set description and let the designers create within that.

My ability to persuade my wife to marry me was quite my most brilliant achievement ... Of course, it would have been impossible for any ordinary man to have got through what I had to go through in peace and war without the devoted aid of what we call, in England, one's better half.

The education of our people should be a lifelong process by which we continue to feed new vigor into the lifestream of the Nation through intelligent, reasoned decisions. Let us not think of education only in terms of its costs, but rather in terms of the infinite potential of the human mind that can be realized through education. Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our Nation.

Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of - heightened nightsight, an empathy shared with the beasts, a utilization of the more obscure abilities of our minds. Nothing that science can't explain away. Wizardry is spells and enchantments. Fairy tales.

One must have been, at some time or other, in a situation where a small sum was as necessary almost as life itself, with no more ability to raise it than to raise the dead, before he can fully appreciate the value of money.

When fortune wishes to bring mighty events to a successful conclusion, she selects some man of spirit and ability who knows how to seize the opportunity she offers.

Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain? The ability to suffer is a small matter: in that line, weak women and even slaves often attain masterliness. But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of it that is great, that belongs to greatness.

Hitler appeared, a man with limited intellectual abilities and unfit for any useful work, bursting with envy and bitterness against all whom circumstance and nature had favored over him....In his desperate ambition for power he discovered that his speeches, confused and pervaded with hate as they were, received wild acclaim by those whose situation and orientation resembled his own. He picked up this human flotsam on the streets and in the taverns and organized them around himself. This is the way he launched his political career.

If you’re not going to do it to the best of your ability, then don’t do it at all.

What may intimidate a man is a woman who thinks with her mind before she feels with her heart. Nevertheless what determines the strength in the man is his ability to accept one when he sees one.

Many of us fight for and boast our freedom of what is ultimately the ability to prove ourselves to other people. It is unfortunate that only a few of us are so free in our joy, we no longer feel the need to prove ourselves to anyone.

The height of cleverness is in one's ability to be very clever without seeming clever at all.

You think you're losing your mind, but do keep in mind, as long as you may, that the ability to go on thinking such a thing means it's not all gone.

Discernment is the son of good judgment and the father of self-control. When mixed with an already clear conscience, the ability to read the true motives of a critic keeps one's conscience both clear and at ease.

I would rather my descendants have greater abilities and a greater knowledge of the love of Christ than I do, much like standing on one's shoulders in order to get a clearer view of the valley.

When people start liking people, that’s when someone has the ability to get hurt.

The United States has the best, deepest, widest, and most transparent capital markets in the world which give you, the investor, the ability to buy and sell large amounts at very cheap prices. That is a good thing.

The author brings to the table a healthy skepticism of the conventional wisdom, an admirable ability to separate fact from fancy, and an undisguised repugnance for the mumbo-jumbo that's the curse of so much commentary on anything to do with economics or investment. A World of Wealth is not only a lively read, but an exceptionally enlightening and rewarding one to boot.

Disgrace is a subtle, multi-layered story, as much concerned with politics as it is with the itch of male flesh. Coetzee's prose is chaste and lyrical without being self- conscious: it is a relief to encounter writing as quietly stylish as this. I was not totally convinced by Lurie's musical abilities, with regard to his proposed opera, but that is my sole complaint.

I realized that influence was inextricably linked to impact — the more influence you had, the more impact you could create. . . . The ability to make things go viral felt like the closest that we could get to having a human superpower.

Knowledge and ideas tend to be a bit like experience - nice, but not necessarily useful. Clear thinking, logical priorities and the ability to reason will beat bright ideas and unassisted experience everytime.

Balance, or drivability, and the ability to accelerate while cornering are more important than maximum cornering power - every time. Until you reach teh top levels of professional motor racing you will achieve more results by optimizing the package that you have than by redesigning it.

As an athlete, you'll never feel bad about losing, but what you will feel bad about is underperforming. That's a real thing and it happens a lot when we don't live up to our potential. And that keeps you up at night and can give you years and years of regret. It could be a relationship, it could be a homework assignment, or it could be an athletic competition. If you don't go out and perform to the best of your ability, it will really bother you.

What really matters when facing a challenge? What matters is learning. You want to test yourself, throw yourself into something outside your comfort zone and see what youre capable of. Your true goal is not to conquer fifty feet of inanimate rock, but to expand your abilities through learning.

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - [...] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

Leverage is the ability to apply positive pressure on yourself to follow through on your decisions even when it hurts.

Poverty when coupled with creativeness is usually free of frustration. This is true of the poor artisan skilled in his trade and of the poor writer, artist, and scientist in the full possession of creative powers. Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out. The decline of handicrafts in modern times is perhaps one of the causes for the rise of frustration and the increased susceptibility of the individual to mass movements.

Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability.

The human race is a remarkable creature, one with great potential, and I hope that 'Star Trek' has helped to show us what we can be if we believe in ourselves and our abilities.

You need to have the ability to gracefully navigate the world.

That fundamentally undermines your ability to access the best part of your instincts. So my advice to those people would be stop thinking and introspecting so much and do a little more acting.

There is something wonderful about singing and writing music, I think there is something special about creativity and the ability humans have in that area.

One of the most important virtues of the American character is our ability to approach the complexities that life presents us with common sense and decency, .. The considered judgment of the American people is not going to rise or fall on the fine distinctions of a legal argument but on straight talk and the truth. It is time for the president and the Congress to follow that common sense for the good of the country.

Any time you have an individual who is very confident in their abilities to persuade, there can be a rude awakening under cross-examination.

It is not gender, nor age, nor race, but your ability to work hard at what you love.

The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.

Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.

It's your ability to learn quickly and contribute quickly that matters. One of the things I tell people these days is that there is no perfect fit when you're looking for the next big thing to do. You have to take opportunities and make an opportunity fit for you, rather than the other way around. The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have.

The best antidote to stress is resilience... having the ability to respond to change or adversity proactively and resourcefully.