Famous quotes containing the word ability:
“The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language,’ that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar.’”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“Our ability to fall in love requires enough comfort with our masculinity to join it with someone’s femininity and feel enhanced. . . . If our mother made us feel secure and proud in our masculinity, then we want to find that again in our wife. If we are really comfortable with our mother, we can even marry a woman who is a friend rather than an adversary, and form a true partnership.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“It is a rule of creative ability that it does nothing of any value, while it is possessed by this afflatus of vanity.”
—Christina Stead (1902–1983)