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Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.
Sep 17, 2025
Attitudes are every bit as important as aptitudes.
Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.
Each man has to seek out his own special aptitude for a higher life in the midst of the humble and inevitable reality of daily existence. Than this, there can be no nobler aim in life.
Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.
Genius consists of equal parts of natural aptitude and hard work.
Everyone has some natural talent or aptitude in one or more areas. If you can identify those areas you not only will be happier and perform more successfully in that role, but you will also become better paid for that. Our free-market system pays for performance at some point. When you have a natural talent or aptitude, coupled with desire and experience, the result is productivity plus.
If you learn from defeat, you haven't really lost.
Aptitude can show calling, but it isn't the only indicator. Ineptitude or dysfunction may reveal calling more than talent, curiously enough.
Genius is nothing but a greater aptitude for patience.
Aptitude starts with attitude.
In aptitude tests, I scored highest in music.
In the words of a very famous dead person, 'A nation that does not know its history is doomed to do poorly on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.
Maybe careers aren’t something you can really plan for. They just sort of happen, like brown eyes or flat feet. I took one of those career aptitude tests last year, and it showed that I should be a flight attendant or a seamstress. Not a fashion designer or anything, mind you, but a sweatshop worker. Apparently stewardesses and sweatshop workers and I enjoy a lot of the same interests and activities.
I can’t answer either question. But the look she gives me reminds me of the look in the attack dog’s eyes in the aptitude test – a vicious, predatory stare. She wants to rip me to pieces. I can’t lie down in submission now. I have become an attack dog too.
I know I belong in Dauntless because everything I did in that aptitude test told me so. I'm loyal to my faction for that reason -- because there's nowhere else I could possibly be. But her? And you?" She shakes her head. "I have no idea who you're loyal to. And I'm not going to pretend like everything's okay.
Once again the Naderites were onstage attacking the Educational Testing Service - the organization which develops and administers the scholastic aptitude tests...the reason for the wax is that the E.T.S. tests persist in showing some people to be smarter than others. And if some people are smarter than others, there might actually be some justification for an economic system in which some people have more money and authority than others.
My high school guidance counselor, Mrs. Inverholl, once had me take an aptitude test to figure out my future. The number one job recommendation for my set of skills was an air traffic accident investigator, of which there are fewer than fifty in the world. The number two job was a museum curator for Chinese-American studies. The number three job was a circus clown.
The president of a TV network generously agreed to take his company's aptitude test, a test required of all the personnel. He did badly. As a result he was in a sullen mood for the rest of the day. When he got home that night, his wife asked why he looked so grouchy. I took the company's aptitude test this morning. What did it show? asked the wife. It showed, boomed the executive, that such tests are idiotic. That's what it showed.
Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.
It is possible that the meaning of wisdom in Hebrew indicates aptitude for stratagems and the application of thought in such a way that the stratagems and ruses may be used in achieving either rational or moral virtues, or in achieving skill in a practical art, or in working evil and wickedness.
The Good Lord in his infinite wisdom, did not create us all equal when it comes to size, strength, appearance, or various aptitudes. But success is not being better than someone else, success is the peace of mind that is a direct result of self-satisfacti on in knowing that you gave your best effort to become the best of which you are capable.
...In Paris she found Magnus, who was living in a garret apartment and paiting, an occupation for which he had no aptitude whatsoever. He let her sleep on a mattress by the window, and in the night, when she woke up screaming for Will, he came and put his arms around her, smelling of turpentine. "The first one is always the hardest," he said. "The first?" "The first one you love who dies," he said. "It gets easier, after.
Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.
Work is honorable. It is good therapy for most problems. It is the antidote for worry. It is the equalizer for deficiency of native endowment. Work makes it possible for the average to approach genius. What we may lack in aptitude, we can make up for in performance. . . .
We must infer that a plant or animal of any species, is made up of special units, in all of which there dwells the intrinsic aptitude to aggregate into the form of that species: just as in the atoms of a salt, there dwells the intrinsic aptitude to crystallize in a particular way.
The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.
As women's leadership qualities come to play a more dominant role in the public sphere, their particular aptitudes for long-term negotiating, analytic listening, and creating an ambiance in which people work with zest and spirit will help reconcile the split between the ideals of being efficient and being humane. This integration of female values is already producing a more collaborative kind of leadership, and changing the very ideal of what strong leadership actually is.
The charter school is a possibility, an alternative in certain circumstances, but not in most, and not in most places, and not - most parents don't have either the time, the inclination or the aptitude to sit and go through sifting what school and what is available and what the options are.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or demonstrated--it is an art. Critical genius means an aptitude for discerning truth under appearances or in disguises which conceal it; for discovering it in spite of the errors of testimony, the frauds of tradition, the dust of time, the loss or alteration of texts. It is the sagacity of the hunter whom nothing deceives for long, and whom no ruse can throw off the trail.
I'm arrogant enough to tell you that I'm smart enough to have scored higher on my Scholastic Aptitude Test than any US president whose SAT score has been made public. I even scored higher than ex-presidential candidate Al Gore, whose SAT score was so high, it was deemed as potentially off-putting to voters.
No writer, painter, or actor - no artist - is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few people are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is 'genius'), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.
In the discovery of lemmas the best aid is a mental aptitude for it. For we may see many who are quick at solutions and yet do not work by method ; thus Cratistus in our time was able to obtain the required result from first principles, and those the fewest possible, but it was his natural gift which helped him to the discovery.
I have this ability to find this hidden talent in people that sometimes even they didn't know they had.
In giving advice, aptitude is often less to be considered, than seasonableness.
An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative [career]. But what decided the matter for [Teddy Cruz] was the sight of a fourth-year architecture student sitting at his desk at a window, drawing and nursing a cup of coffee as rain fell outside. 'I don't know, I just liked the idea of having this relationship to the paper and the adventure of imagining the spaces. That was the first image that captured me.
Today's students can put dope in their veins or hope in their brains. If they can conceive it and believe it, they can achieve it. They must know it is not their aptitude but their attitude that will determine their altitude.
There can be little question that good composition is far less dependent upon acquaintance with its laws, than upon practice and natural aptitude. A clear head, a quick imagination, and a sensitive ear, will go far towards making all rhetorical precepts needless.
Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
Aptitudes are assumed, they should become accomplishments. That is the purpose of all education.
It is not your aptitude, but your attitude, that determines your altitude.
No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.
I tried being a mechanic and I tried catering, but I realized I had even less aptitude for semi-skilled labour than for academic work.
If you think you can't, you're right.
Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.
If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.
Tris: Wait. So you have no idea what my aptitude is? Tori: Yes and No. My conclusion is that you display equal aptitude for Abnegation, Dauntless and Erudite. People who get this kind of result are..are called...Divergent.
Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
If you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned.