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Skills Quotes

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Skills Quotes

“The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational - an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable.”

“Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage. He could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively.”

“Most of all we need an education which will create an educated mind. This is a mind not simply a repository of information and skills, but a mind that is a source of creative skepticism, characterized by a willingness to challenge old assumptions and to be challenged, a spaciousness of outlook, and convictions that are deeply held, but which new facts and new experiences can always modify.”

“There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. It makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel. Total loss of all basic motor skills, blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue - the mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column. Which is interesting, because you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can’t control it.”

“The new and most powerful union of all will be a union of one one man, one woman, one worker with special skills, an inquiring mind, and an independent attitude, his creativity intact, his love of life blooming. The union of one will be peopled by one man or one woman who is alive. Such a person is always sought by the intelligent manager.”

“In their pure form, the martial arts demand the intense awareness of the meditative mind, and have nothing to do with anger or wanton aggression. A practitioner is taught from the outset that the skills must never be used for personal gain, but only in self-defence or in the protection of others -- and even then only enough force as is absolutely necessary should be used.”

“Blest be the gracious Power, who taught mankind To stamp a lasting image of the mind! Beasts may convey, and tuneful birds may sing, Their mutual feelings, in the opening spring; But Man alone has skill and power to send The heart's warm dictates to the distant friend; 'Tis his alone to please, instruct, advise Ages remote, and nations yet to rise.”

“the process of a book's coming to life is not fully complete until your imagination meets mine on the page. The words evoke pictures and something altogether new is created, something different from the limits of my own skills and imagination. Something that is a marriage between your heart, mind, and body - and mine.”

“We humans have indeed always been adept at dovetailing our minds and skills to the shape of our current tools and aids. But when those tools and aids start dovetailing back - when our technologies actively, automatically, and continually tailor themselves to us, just as we do to them - then the line between tool and user becomes flimsy indeed.”

“There is a strange fact about the human mind, a fact that differentiates the mind sharply from the body. The body is limited in ways that the mind is not. One sign of this is that the body does not continue indefinitely to grow in strength and develop in skill and grace. By the time most people are thirty years old, their bodies are as good as they will ever be; in fact, many persons' bodies have begun to deteriorate by that time. But there is no limit to the amount of growth and development that the mind can sustain. The mind does not stop growing at any particular age.”

“It can be helpful to remember that the enlightened mind and the ordinary mind are two sides of the same coin. The mind is like the sea, which can be rough on the surface, with mountainous waves stirred up by ferocious wind, but calm and peaceful at the bottom. Sometimes we can catch sight of this peaceful mind even in times of trouble. These glimpses of peace show us that we may have more inner resources to draw upon than we had realized. With skill and patience, we can learn how to be in touch with our peaceful selves.”

“I do not deny that medicine is a gift of God, nor do I refuse to acknowledge science in the skill of many physicians; but, take the best of them, how far are they from perfection? A sound regimen produces excellent effects. When I feel indisposed, by observing a strict diet and going to bed early, I generally manage to get round again, that is, if I can keep my mind tolerably at rest. I have no objection to the doctors acting upon certain theories, but, at the same time, they must not expect us to be the slaves of their fancies.”

“What is intelligence, anyway It is only a word that people use to name those unknown processes with which our brains solve problems we call hard. But whenever you learn a skill yourself, you're less impressed or mystified when other people do the same. This is why the meaning of 'intelligence' seems so elusive: It describes not some definite thing but only the momentary horizon of our ignorance about how minds might work.”

“Reading develops cognitive skills. It trains our minds to think critically and to question what you are told. This is why dictators censor or ban books. It's why it was illegal to teach slaves to read. It's why girls in developing countries have acid thrown in their faces when they walk to school.”

“Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.”

“In the productions of the mind, as in those of the soil, the gifts of nature are excelled by industry and skill . . .”

“The greatest damage done by advertising is precisely that it incessantly demonstrates the prostitution of men and women who lend their intellects, their voices, their artistic skills to purposes in which they themselves do not believe, and that it teaches [in the words of Leo Marx] 'the essential meaninglessness of all creations of the mind: words, images, and ideas.'”

“The term syndrome generally appears to be a constellation, or collection, of similar traits or behaviors within an individual. So, savants do have sort of a constellation of symptoms, which is characterized by some spectacular skill, or skills, coupled with this massive memory which is grafted on to some underlying disability. So those three conditions quantify, in my mind, the term syndrome.”

“Happiness is not the endless pursuit of pleasant experiences - that sounds more like a recipe for exhaustion - but a way of being that results from cultivating a benevolent mind, emotional balance, inner freedom, inner peace, and wisdom. Each of these qualities is a skill that can be enhanced through training the mind.”