So many times people are afraid of competition, when it should bring out the best in us. We all have talents and abilities, so why be intimidated by other people's skills?
Enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy... your entire education has has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.
All in the golden afternoon Full leisurely we glide; For both our oars, with little skill, By little arms are plied, While little hands make vain pretence Our wanderings to guide.
The schematicism by which our understanding deals with the phenomenal world ... is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs.
But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, "The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day.
And the maestro surely wielded the chairman's baton with extraordinary skill. His stellar record suggests that the only right answer to the age-old question of whether it is better to be lucky or good may be: both.
Now that practical skills have developed enough to provide adequately for material needs, one of these sciences which are not devoted to utilitarian ends [mathematics] has been able to arise in Egypt, the priestly caste there having the leisure necessary for disinterested research.
People who watch their weight, golf scores, and fuel bills seem to shun quantitative evaluation of their investment management skills although it involves the most important client in the world-themselves.
In old age our bodies are worn-out instruments, on which the soul tries in vain to play the melodies of youth. But because the instrument has lost its strings, or is out of tune, it does not follow that the musician has lost his skill.
Every piece of marble has a statue in it waiting to be released by a person of sufficient skill to chip away the unnecessary parts. Just as the sculptor is to the marble, so is education to the soul. It releases it. For only educated people are free people. You cannot create a statue by smashing the marble with a hammer, and you cannot by the force of arms release the spirit or the soul of people.
It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have it, it requires ten times as much skill to keep it.