Ability Quotes

Proverb - “Behind an able man there are always other able men.”

Sir Christopher Wren - “Ability is a poor man's wealth.”

Basil S. Walsh - “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.”

Henry David Thoreau - “I know of no more encouraging fact than the ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - “It is our duty — as men and women — to behave as though limits to our ability do not exist. We are collaborators in creation of the Universe.”

George Bernard Shaw - “Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.”

Theodore Roosevelt - “Do what you can — with what you have — where you are.”

J. G. Pollard - “Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do the work.”

Gaius Plinius Secondus Pliny, the Elder - “No man's abilities are so remarkably shining as not to stand in need of a proper opportunity, a patron, and even the praises of a friend to recommend them to the notice of the world.”

Dr. Laurence J. Peter & Raymond Hull - “Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.”

Christabel Pankhurst - “Ability is sexless.”

Nicholas of Cusa - “Ability doth hit the mark where presumption over-shooteth and diffidence falleth short.”

Flower A. Newhouse - “Lack of will power has caused more failure than lack of intelligence or ability.”

Napoléon Bonaparte - “Ability is of little account without opportunity.”

Ian McLaren - “Ability involves responsibility; power, to its last particle, is duty.”

Orison Swett Marden - “What a great discrepancy there is between men and the results they achieve! It is due to the difference in their power of calling together all the rays of their ability and concentrating them upon one point.”

Orison Swett Marden - “The Creator has not given you a longing to do that which you have no ability to do.”

Charles Luckman - “Success is that old ABC — Ability, Breaks, and Courage.”

François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld - “To know how to hide one's ability is great skill.”

François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld - “The height of ability consists in a thorough knowledge of the real value of things, and of the genius of the age in which we live.”

Lyndon Baines Johnson - “Any jackass can kick down a barn but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”

Elbert Hubbard - “It is a fine thing to have ability, but the ability to discover ability in others is the true test.”

Elbert Hubbard - “There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.”

Robert Half - “There is something that is much more scarce, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.”

Gail Hamilton - “Every person is responsible for all the good within the scope of his abilities, and for no more, and none can tell whose sphere is the largest.”