Quotes: Ability, Part 1

(Use it, don't waste it!)

One big reason why men do not develop greater abilities, greater sales strength, greater resourcefulness is because they use neither their abilities nor their opportunities. We don't need more strength or more ability or greater opportunity. What we need is to use what we have.

Men fail and their families suffer deprivations when all the time these men have in their possession the same assets other men are utilizing to accumulate a fortune. . . . Life doesn't cheat. It doesn't pay in counterfeit coin. It doesn't lock up shop and go home when pay-day comes. It pays every man exactly what he has earned.

The age-old law that a man gets what he earns hasn't been suspended. When we take that truth home and believe it, we've turned a big corner on the high road that runs straight through to success.

—Basil S. Walsh

Quotations

There is something that is much more scarce, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.

—Robert Half

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

—Theodore Roosevelt

People are always ready to admit a man’s ability after he gets there.

—Bob Edwards

Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

—Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

Native ability without education is like a tree without fruit.

—Aristippus (435?-356? B.C.)

ability: A special skill, like speaking several languages, or keeping your mouth shut in one.

—Evan Esar, Esar’s Comic Dictionary

The less their ability, the more their conceit.

—Ahad HaAm

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

—Ahad HaAm

Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.

—Malcolm Forbes (1919-1990)

The Army has carried the American . . . ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed, and color; but also on ability.

—Tom Lehrer (1928-)


Links to quotations units. Other Quotes, Quotation Units.