Mastery Quotes - Page 17

• A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

  Peter Thiel

  Agency, Over You, Important

  Peter Thiel, Blake Masters (2014). “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future”, p.64, Crown Business

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• Anyone who claims to be intrigued by the "intellectual challenge of the markets" is not a trader. The markets are as intellectually challenging as a fistfight. Ultimately, trading is an exercise in self-mastery and endurance.

  Ralph Vince

  Exercise, Self, Psychology

  Ralph Vince (1992). “The Mathematics of Money Management: Risk Analysis Techniques for Traders”, p.15, John Wiley & Sons

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• True mastery can be gained by letting things go their own way.

  Stephen Mitchell

  Inspirational, Going With The Flow, Way

  Byron Katie, Stephen Mitchell (2008). “A Thousand Names For Joy: How To Live In Harmony With The Way Things Are”, p.141, Random House

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• The good life is best construed as a matrix that includes happiness, occasional sadness, a sense of purpose, playfulness, and psychological flexibility, as well autonomy, mastery, and belonging.

  Robert Biswas-Diener

  Good Life, Sadness, Psychology

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• Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.

  Friedrich Engels

  Mean, Blood, Law

  Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Wolfgang Schirmacher (1997). “German socialist philosophy”, Continuum Intl Pub Group

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• The Irishman frees himself from slavery when he realizes the truth that the capitalist system is the most foreign thing in Ireland. The Irish question is a social question. The whole age-long fight of the Irish people against their oppressors resolves itself in the last analysis into a fight for the mastery of the means of life, the sources of production, in Ireland. Who would own and control the land? The people, or the invaders; and if the invaders, which set of them - the most recent swarm of land thieves, or the sons of the thieves of a former generation?

  James Connolly

  Mean, Fighting, Son

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• Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry. [...] To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery.

  George Polya

  Attitude, Opportunity, Opposites

  George Pólya (1945). “How to Solve it: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method”

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• The Navy can lose us the war, but only the Air Force can win it. Therefore our supreme effort must be to gain overwhelming mastery in the Air. The Fighters are our salvation . . . but the Bombers alone provide the means of victory. . . . In no other way at present visible can we hope to overcome the immense military power of Germany.

  Winston Churchill

  Military, War, Mean

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• It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set.

  Joshua Waitzkin

  Skills, Profound, Technique

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• It [slavery] has exercised absolute mastery over the American Church. . . . With the Bible in their hands, her priesthood have attempted to prove that slavery came down from God out of heaven. They have become slaveholders and dealers in human flesh.

  William Lloyd Garrison

  Hands, Heaven, Religion

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• "Spirituality" in business sounds lofty. How practical is it? The answer is "very." There's a fundamental way in which Spirit and consciousness contribute to worldly success-and it has long been ignored. [. . .] As experts, authors and gurus often note, the game of business is to influence the external world. But here's the point: How can you control your environment if you can't even manage your own thoughts and emotions? In other words, how do you rule the world without first mastering yourself? The cornerstone of effective leadership is self-mastery.

  Patricia Aburdene

  Leadership, Self, Games

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• When doing what we most love transforms us into the best possible version of ourselves and that version hints at even greater future possibilities, the urge to explore those possibilities becomes feverish compulsion. Intrinsic motivation goes through the roof. Thus flow becomes an alternative path to mastery, sans the misery.

  Steven Kotler

  Motivation, Alternatives, Hints

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• Concentration is at the root of mental mastery.

  Robin Sharma

  Motivational, Roots, Concentration

  Robin Sharma (2003). “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams & Reaching Your Destiny”, p.47, Jaico Publishing House

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• A family's responses to crisis or to a new situation mirror those of a child. That is to say, the way a small child deals with a new challenge (for instance, learning to walk) has certain predictable stages: regression, anxiety, mastery, new energy, growth, and feedback for future achievement. These stages can also be seen in adults coping with new life events, whether positive or negative.

  T. Berry Brazelton

  Children, Mirrors, Achievement

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• Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. … Aristotle, so far as I know, was the first man to proclaim explicitly that man is a rational animal. His reason for this view was … that some people can do sums. … It is in virtue of the intellect that man is a rational animal. The intellect is shown in various ways, but most emphatically by mastery of arithmetic. The Greek system of numerals was very bad, so that the multiplication table was quite difficult, and complicated calculations could only be made by very clever people.

  Bertrand Russell

  Clever, Animal, Men

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• The cornerstone of effective leadership is self-mastery.

  Patricia Aburdene

  Business, Self, Effective Leadership

  Patricia Aburdene (2005). “Megatrends Two Thousand and Ten”, Hampton Roads Publishing Company Incorporated

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• In astronomy, the law of gravitation is plainly better worth knowing than the position of a particular planet on a particular night, or even on every night throughout a year. There are in the law a splendour and simplicity and sense of mastery which illuminate a mass of otherwise uninteresting details. But in history the matter is far otherwise. Historical facts, many of them, have an intrinsic value, a profound interest on their own account, which makes them worthy of study, quite apart from any possibility of linking them together by means of causal laws.

  Bertrand Russell

  Mean, Science, Night

  "On History". The Independent Review 3, pp. 207-215, users.drew.edu. July 1904.

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• Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

  Toni Morrison

  Ideas, Racism, Typical

  Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993

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• I have seen some who did not know when to turn aside their eyes in meeting yours. A truly confident and magnanimous spirit is wiser than to contend for the mastery in such encounters. Serpents alone conquer by the steadiness of their gaze. My friend looks me in the face and sees me, that is all.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Friendship, Eye, Snakes

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.496, Simon and Schuster

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• Consciousness of error is, to a certain extent, a consciousness of understanding; and correction of error is the plainest proof of energy and mastery.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Errors, Understanding, Energy

  Walter Savage Landor (1853). “The Works of Walter Savage Landor”, p.98

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• Mastery is proven only in limitation,
  and law alone can give us freedom.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Law, Giving, Proven

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• Every great religion on the planet, regardless of what spiritual or cultural tradition from which it is that it emerges, announces and declares that spiritual mastery is an open possibility for every member of the human race. If that is not true, then the highest promise of God is a lie.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Spiritual, Lying, Race

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• Whatever liberates our spirit, without also giving us mastery over ourselves, is destructive.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Freedom, Giving, Spirit

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• I took the standpoint that the profession of technologist, a man who masters matter, is a masculine profession, if not the only masculine profession there is.

  Max Frisch

  Technology, Men, Matter

  Max Frisch (1994). “Homo Faber”, p.86, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The transformation toward eternal life is gradual. The heavy gross energy of body, mind, and spirit must first be purified and uplifted. When the energy ascends... then self mastery can be sought.

  Laozi

  Self, Mind, Energy

  Laozi, Brian Browne Walker (1992). “Hua Hu Ching: Teachings of Lao Tzu”

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