Top 64 Skilful Quotes
#1. A skilful (commander) strikes a decisive blow, and stops.
Lao-Tzu
#2. The instrument that you play on, Pollyanna, will be the great heart of the world; and to me that seems the most wonderful instrument of all - to learn. Under your touch, if you are skilful, it will respond with smiles or tears, as you will.
Eleanor H. Porter
#3. Street hockey is great for kids. It's energetic, competitive, and skilful. And best of all, it keeps them off the street.
Gus Kyle
#4. Everything is clear to me - outline, details, future, emotion. Not like the world, where everything is muddy and messed, and nothing ever works out the way you mean it to - no matter how skilful or how honourable you are, no matter how vile your enemy. When
Kelly Gardiner
#5. In taking stock of a politician, the first question is not whether he was a good man who used righteous means, but whether he was successful in gaining power, in keeping it, and in governing; whether, in short, he was skilful at his particular craft or a bungler.
Frederick Scott Oliver
#6. The skilful traveller leaves no traces of his wheels or footsteps
Lao-Tzu
#7. Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.
Marcel Proust
#8. Young Americans today are no more learned or skilful than their predecessors, no more knowledgeable, fluent, up-to-date, or inquisitive, except in the materials of youth culture.
Mark Bauerlein
#9. Whatever's merely willful, and not miraculous (be never it so skilful) must wither fail and cease - but better than to grow beauty knows no.
E. E. Cummings
#10. [In eighteenth-century Britain] engineers for the most began as simple workmen, skilful and ambitious but usually illiterate and self-taught. They were either millwrights like Bramah, mechanics like Murdoch and George Stephenson, or smiths like Newcomen and Maudslay.
John Desmond Bernal
#11. But then southern hemisphere teams are more skilful than their northern hemisphere counterparts, which means games can be easier to referee.
Alan Lewis
#12. Messi is a genius. He has everything. When I watch him, I see a player who is very, very, skilful, very clever and his left foot is like Diego Maradona's.
Franz Beckenbauer
#13. It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our contemporary reality. Conversely, it just takes skilful storytelling to recharge that connection to make the past come alive in our present.
Simon Schama
#14. Hannibal knew better how to conquer than how to profit by the conquest; and Napoleon was more skilful in taking positions than in maintaining them. As to reverses, no general cart presume to say that he may not be defeated; but he can, and ought to say, that he will not be surprised.
Charles Caleb Colton
#15. The skilful employer of men will employ the wise man, the brave man, the covetous man, and the stupid man.
Du Mu
#16. A liar is a man who does now know how to deceive, a flatterer one who only deceives fools: he who knows how to make skilful use of the truth, and understands its eloquence, can alone pride himself in cleverness.
Luc De Clapiers
#17. The skilful binder uses no strings or knots, while to unloose what he has bound will be impossible.
Lao-Tzu
#18. In the hands of Science and indomitable energy, results the most gigantic and absorbing may be wrought out by skilful combinations of acknowledged data and the simplest means.
George Biddell Airy
#20. There is nothing in the way of amelioration of the conditions of life, of politics, of social and ethical matters, that may not be affected through the skilful application of those principles of advertising that, in business, have proved to be so wonderfully effective.
George Arthur French
#21. Anything can be good. Even Last Action Hero could've been good. There's an idea somewhere in almost any movie : if you can find something that you love, then you can do it. If you can't, it doesn't matter how skilful you are ...
Joss Whedon
#22. What skilful limner e'er would choose To paint the rainbow's varying hues, Unless to mortal it were given To dip his brush in dyes of heaven?
Walter Scott
#23. Pity! Religion has so seldom found
A skilful guide into poetic ground!
The flowers would spring where'er she deign'd to stray
And every muse attend her in her way.
William Cowper
#24. Well I don't feel sectarian against sparseness, although I sometimes get a little chippy about this. I resent the way that a certain notion of parsimony has become the norm for skilful literary writing.
China Mieville
#25. A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.
Samuel Butler
#26. Watercolour is not especially difficult, but I must warn you to steer clear of those pretty English watercolourists, so skilful and alas so weak, and so often too truthful.
Camille Pissarro
#27. In the stern sat Aragon son of Arathorn, proud and erect, guiding the boat with skilful strokes; his hood was cast back, and his dark hair was blowing in the wind, a light was in his eyes: a king returning from exile to his own land.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#28. Instructors should not only be skilful in those sciences which they teach, but have skill in the method of teaching, and patience in the practice.
Isaac Watts
#29. Go! dive into the Southern Sea, and when
Th'ast found, to trouble the nice sight of men,
A swelling pearl, and such whose single worth
Boasts all the wonders which the seas bring forth,
Give it Endymion's love, whose ev'ry tear
Would more enrich the skilful jeweller.
William Davenant
#30. He also said that he marvelled that among the Greeks, those who were skilful in a thing contend together; but those who have no such skill act as judges of the contest.
Diogenes Laertius
#31. Powerful infatuations can be induced by the skilful potioneer, but never yet has anyone managed to create the truly unbreakable, eternal, unconditional attachment that alone can be called Love
J.K. Rowling
#32. However enlightened and however skilful a central power may be, it cannot of itself embrace all the details of the existence of a great nation.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#33. Every movement of the theater by a skilful poet is communicated, as it were, by magic, to the spectators; who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are inflamed with all the variety of passions which actuate the several personages of the drama.
David Hume
#34. It appears a bold thing to say so when one sees how much many a modern author who knows how to make a skilful use of the Book of Chronicles has to tell about the tabernacle.
Julius Wellhausen
#35. Thus the skilful general conducts his army just as though he were leading a single man, willy-nilly, by the hand.
Sun Tzu
#36. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.
Yuval Noah Harari
#37. The Tao is hidden, and has no name; but it is the Tao which is skilful at imparting (to all things what they need) and making them complete.
Lao-Tzu
#38. But I have heard that he who is skilful in managing the life entrusted to him for a time travels on the land without having to shun rhinoceros or tiger, and enters a host without having to avoid buff coat or sharp weapon.
Lao-Tzu
#39. The skilful closer needs no bolts or bars, while to open what he has shut will be impossible;
Lao-Tzu
#40. Only well-written works will descend to posterity. Fulness of knowledge, interesting facts, even useful inventions, are no pledge of immortality, for they may be employed by more skilful hands; they are outside the man; the style is the man himself.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#41. Literature nowadays is a trade ... the successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets.
George Gissing
#42. The skilful disputant well knows that he never has his enemy at more advantage than when, by allowing the premises, he shows him arguing wrong from his own principles.
William Warburton
#43. Football is a whole skill to itself. A whole world. A whole universe to itself. Me love it because you have to be skilful to play it! Freedom! Football is freedom.
Bob Marley
#44. You will have written exceptionally well if, by skilful arrangement of your words, you have made an ordinary one seem original.
Horace
#45. The skilful class of flatterers praise the discourse of an ignorant friend and the face of a deformed one.
Juvenal
#46. There are many special interests skilful at manipulating circumstances and communications in such a way as to benefit their own ends and not necessarily the public good.
Randal Marlin
#47. Hence that general is skilful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skilful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.
Sun Tzu
#48. To perceive victory when it is known to all is not really skilful. Everyone calls victory in battle good, but it is not really good.
Sun Tzu
#49. [Google is] an omnivorous collector of information, a hyperencyclopedic vault of human knowledge, an unerring auctioneer, an eerily skilful student of languages, behaviour, and desires.
Steven Levy
#50. In my firm, we dealt in lies. Advertising is that ... the skilful use of the truth to mislead, to spoil, to debase.
Storm Jameson
#51. Meditation is a skilful letting go: gently but with resolution.
Ajahn Sumedho
#52. I think I'm skilful enough, but I don't consider myself a naturally talented, gifted sports person.
Tony McCoy
#53. Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague.
Honore De Balzac
#54. I had lots of posters on my bedroom wall of players like Zico, many Brazilian and Italian players, not many players in particular but I loved football so much and I especially loved skilful players.
Emmanuel Petit
#55. You've got to do it all, the physical as well as the skilful.
Jamie Redknapp
#56. Straight roads do not make skilful drivers.
Paulo Coelho
#57. Charles' driving, skilful though it might be, kept his passengers in a constant state of breathlessness.
Georgette Heyer
#58. I enjoyed Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom.' Would I make that into a film? I think it's better suited to television. That would very much be a dialogue and performance piece, and it would take some very skilful direction - but not my kind of directing. But I thought it was a real literary work.
Peter Weir
#59. The skilful speaker says nothing that can be found fault with or blamed;
Lao-Tzu
#60. Occasionally a single anecdote opens a character; biography has its comparative anatomy, and a saying or a sentiment enables the skilful hand to construct the skeleton.
Robert Aris Willmott
#61. The local liberal press, much molested by the censorship, had its courageous and skilful writers such as VM Doroshevich, the master of that semi-literary and semi-journalistic essay at which Bronstein himself was one day to excel.
Isaac Deutscher
#62. The first Rudiments of Morality, broach'd by skilful Politicians, to render Men useful to each other as well as tractable, were chiefly contrived that the Ambitious might reap the more Benefit from, and govern vast Numbers of them with the greater Ease and Security.
Bernard De Mandeville
#63. There is no architect
Can build as the Muse can;
She is skilful to select
Materials for her plan.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#64. If opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil's advocate can conjure up. ' (Mill, 1859:37)
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