Proficient Quotes

“It came to him then, permeated his disjointed thoughts. Billie was teaching him-him-how to make love. With a jolt of surprise at the crashing irony, Adrian realized he hadn't known how until now. He, the consummate lover, so renown for his sexual skill, so proficient and controlled and practiced, had only played at making love, where Billie ... God. Clearly, it was all she knew. Pretense just wasn't in her spectrum of capabilities.”

— Shelby Reed

“Since a time has come, Mademoiselle, when the severe laws of men no longer prevent women from applying themselves to the sciences and other disciplines, it seems to me that those of us who can should use this long-craved freedom to study and to let men see how greatly they wronged us when depriving us of its honor and advantages. And if any woman becomes so proficient as to be able to write down her thoughts, let her do so and not despise the honor, but rather flaunt it instead of fine clothes, necklaces, and rings. For these may be considered ours only by use, whereas the honor of being educated is ours entirely.”

— Louise Labé

“The historic transition from Novice to Proficient to Adept was said to be accomplished virtually overnight by the progression from marijuana to peyote to lysergic acid. Instant mysticism had arrived. Before the court of law, hippies demanded freedom for LSD the way early Christians demanded freedom for the Eucharist.”

— William Everson

“We honestly think that we ourselves and those around us should be proficient with spiritual power, moving and acting with agility and endurance, wisdom and purity, able to conquer long-established habits of sloth and rebelliousness, simply on the basis of our desire and effort and sincerity ... We have to train for the spiritual life.”

— Mark Buchanan

“One is either an artist or one is not. It is not something one becomes. It is something that one is from birth. We do not study to be artists. We study to become more proficient. To understand more.”

— Edward Swift

“Perhaps the most important reason of all for taking action now is that time is finite. No matter how proficient you are, you can only accomplish so much in a lifetime. Every second that's wasted reduces the totality of what you can accomplish by one second”

— Robert Ringer

“Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.”

— William S. Burroughs

“She had never been a proficient flirt. Her spasms of kittenish behaviour were graceless and inept, like normal conversation on roller skates. but the combination of the retsina and sun made Emma feel sentimental and light-headed. She reached for her roller skates.”

— David Nicholls

“How many understand that Nature is the essencial character of whatever is. It's something you'll find by looking not at, but in, always in. It's always inside the thing, and it makes the outside. And some day, when you get sufficiently proficient in understanding the use of the term, you can tell by the outside pretty much from what's inside.
[ ... ] But everything that's ever going to be of use to you in architecture or in life or anywhere you go or whatever you do is going to be Nature, in some of its immensely varied forms. So varied that there's no end to the variety imaginable.
"Nature" September 7, 1958”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

“Flying, I continue to be involved with. I love flying, and I hope to keep doing it so long as I can pass my medicals and stay proficient.”

— Ratan Tata

“I was much more interested in the orchestra than the piano, but I did become fairly proficient as a pianist and my teachers felt I had talent and wanted me to become a good concert pianist and earn my living that way.”

— Alan Hovhaness

“The problem was that, while the classic European coming-of-age story generally featured a provincial boy who moved to the city and was transformed into a refined gentleman, the American tradition had evolved into the opposite. The American boy came of age by leaving civilization and striking out toward the hills. There, he shed his cosmopolitan manners and became a robust and proficient man. Not a gentleman, mind you, but a man. This”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

“I think the hard thing about all these tools is that it takes a fair amount of effort to become proficient.”

— Bill Joy

“I get bored at the theatre a lot because I notice that there's not always a connection between the actors. They may be technically proficient, but they're not surprising each other. I'm thrilled by actors who make choices that are surprising.”

— Lusia Strus

“Everything you do, if not in a relaxed state will be done at a lesser level than you are proficient. Thus the tensed expert marksman will aim at a level less than his/her student.”

— Bruce Lee

“I was never attracted to being a very proficient singer or player. I suppose I was interested in creating a vision; in the same way I was very drawn to tension within cinema.”

— Siouxsie Sioux

“Today, most young women are exposed to technology at a very young age, with mobile phones, tablets, the Web or social media. They are much more proficient with technology than prior generations since they use it for all their school work, communication and entertainment.”

— Susan Wojcicki

“Sixteen is an intensely troublesome age. You worry about little things, can't pinpoint where you are in any objective way, become really proficient at strange, pointless skills, and are held in thrall by inexplicable complexes. As you get older, though, through trial and error you can learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiences are well nigh infinite, you'd best figure our your good points and learn to get by with what you have.”

— Haruki Murakami

“I am so not technically proficient at all.”

— Monica Potter

“We started with the basics of kicking and punching, then we moved on once we got proficient in that, we moved on to working with the weapons, and from then on working with the wires.”

— Chiaki Kuriyama

“The mercy bullet
I envy horses: if they break a leg and feel humiliated because they can no longer charge back and forth in the wind, they are cured by a mercy bullet. So if something in me gets broken, physically or spiritually, I would do well to look for a proficient killer, even if he is one of my enemies. I will pay him a fee and the price of the bullet, kiss his hand and his revolver, and if I am able to write, extol him in a poem of rare beauty, for which he can choose the metre and rhyme.”

— Mahmoud Darwish

“If you are speaking of music ... it is of all subjects my delight. There are few people in England I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient. And so would Anne, if her health would have allowed her to apply. I am confident that she would have performed delightfully. - Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice”

— Jane Austen

“I'm not technically proficient enough to attempt all kinds of music.”

— Noel Gallagher

“Those proficient praise no one, blame no one, and accuse no one. They say nothing concerning their self as being anybody or knowing anything.”

— Epictetus

“One of the skills I had to learn and become proficient in is kissing a man. I had never kissed a man. Will Smith did it in his movies, so did Jake Gyllenhaal, and I figured it was my time. So it was me and Steve Carell - fantastic.”

— Dwayne Johnson

“A Christian school should be a place where young men and young women go through a period of spiritual formation and development so that they come out incredibly more proficient at living out their calling than they would have been had they not gone to school.”

— Tony Campolo

“Only the man who has outgrown the stages of consciousness belonging to the past, and has amply fulfilled the duties appointed for him by his world, can achieve full consciousness of the present. To do this he must be sound and proficient in the best sense
a man who as achieved as much as other people, and even a little more. It is these qualities which enable him to gain the next highest level of consciousness.”

— C.G. Jung

“Yes Rosalie, we all know how proficient of an assassin you are.”

— Stephenie Meyer

“Should we become so proficient at self-presentation that we can dissemble without anyone suspecting?”

— Susan Cain

“Through most of its wars, the United States successfully used the attrition approach. It is easier to be proficient at this type of warfare. You need to master only the simplest military skills and possess enormous quantities of arms and munitions.”

— Jim Dunnigan

“A lot of my video work is super lo-fi on purpose. I'm not trying to become technically super proficient. The only thing I'm interested in becoming technically proficient on is my alto saxophone.”

— Matana Roberts

“Soldiers expect the noncommissioned officer to be technically proficient, up front, and honest with them. Soldiers must know that NCOs care, that they can approach the NCO for guidance and direction, and that NCOs can make things happen when a difficult situation arises.”

— Glen E. Morrell

“Approaching the stove, she would don a voluminous apron, toss some meat on a platter, empty a skillet of its perfectly cooked a point vegetables, sprinkle a handful of chopped parsley over all, and then, like a proficient striptease artist, remove the apron, allowing it to fall to the floor with a shake of her hips.”

— Bert Greene

“During World War I the Canadians were the shock troops. In many historical cases, Canadians have been very proficient at killing, and doing what we have to in order to survive. But no one wants to acknowledge that fact.”

— Joseph Boyden

“I know I have a very unusual style of playing, where other more recognized and technically proficient players might look at me and wonder what the heck I'm doing. The purpose of my learning to play the way I do was more to accompany my singing. I figured out a style where I'm mentally playing the drums over a simple melody.”

— Dave Matthews

“True education seeks to make men and women not only good mathematicians, proficient linguists, profound scientists, or brilliant literary lights, but also honest men and women with virtue, temperance, and brotherly love.”

— David O. McKay

“Nobody - but nobody - has ever become really proficient at golf without practice, without doing a lot of thinking and then hitting a lot of shots. It isn't so much a lack of talent; it's a lack of being able to repeat good shots consistently that frustrates most players. And the only answer to that is practice.”

— Jack Nicklaus

“Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror.”

— Amartya Sen

“Studies show American students are becoming less proficient in math. Experts say we should have seen this coming, but nobody could put 2 and 2 together.”

— Jay Leno

“Fourthly, the way of the artisan. The way of the carpenter is to become proficient in the use of his tools, first to lay his plans with true measure and then perform his work according to plan. Thus he passes through life.”

— Miyamoto Musashi

“For all we know, the aliens have already done this and unwittingly concluded that there was no intelligent life on Earth. They would now be looking elsewhere. A more humbling possibility would be if aliens had become aware of the technologically proficient species that now inhabits Earth, yet they had drawn the same conclusion.”

— Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“It takes many years to become proficient in energy conservation. But it is something that happens. You get continually stronger. You see your attention field is far different than it ever was before.”

— Frederick Lenz

“The interesting thing about cybercrime and the whole cyber world is that many of the people that are most proficient in it are young people, really young people.”

— Patricia Arquette

“People create their own success by learning what they need to learn and then by practicing it until they become proficient at it.”

— Brian Tracy

“The system - the American one, at least - is a vast and noble experiment. It has been polestar and exemplar for other nations. But from kindergarten until she graduates from college the girl is treated in it exactly like her brothers. She studies the same subjects, becomes proficient at the same sports. Oh, it is a magnificent lore she learns, education for the mind beyond anything Jane Austen or Saint Theresa or even Mrs. Pankhurst ever dreamed. It is truly Utopian. But Utopia was never meant to exist on this disheveled planet.”

— Phyllis McGinley

“Perfection consists in a constant perseverance to acquire the virtues and become proficient in their practice, because on God's road, not to advance is to fall back since man never remains in the same condition.”

— Vincent De Paul

“Were the life of man prolonged, he would become such a proficient in villainy, that it would become necessary again to drown or to burn the world. Earth would become an hell; for future rewards when put off to a great distance, would cease to encourage, and future punishments to alarm.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

“The more we practice risking to leap, the more proficient we become, the more our fears melt away, and we grow ever stronger in the doing.”

— Gloria Feldt

“You become technically proficient whether you want to or not, the more you take pictures.”

— William Eggleston

“It takes ten thousand hours to truly master anything. Time spent leads to experience; experience leads to proficiency; and the more proficient you are the more valuable you'll be.”

— Malcolm Gladwell