Find the heart of it. Make the complex simple, and you can achieve mastery.
—Dan Millman (b.1946) American Children’s Books Writer, Sportsperson
If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
—Michelangelo (1475–1564) Italian Painter, Sculptor, Architect, Poet, Engineer
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!-incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who didn’t know what fear was,” we ought always to add the flea-and put him at the head of the procession.”
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
—Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) Dutch Painter
You cannot attain mastery by patterning yourself after another or by following custom or tradition. Sheep do that. Masters and leaders never do.
—Roger McDonald (b.1941) Australian Novelist, Poet, Screenwriter, Writer
Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Physicist
If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others.
—Tryon Edwards American Theologian
There are no limits to your possibilities! Your successes will multiply and increase in proportion to your mastery of the law.
—Roger McDonald (b.1941) Australian Novelist, Poet, Screenwriter, Writer