Foundational Skills Quotes

You cannot learn to fly by flying. First you must learn to walk, to run, to climb, to dance.

I started from zero and went back to the basics in gymnastics.

The business of education is not to make the young perfect in any one of the sciences, but so to open and dispose their minds as may best make them - capable of any, when they shall apply themselves to it.

The policy of letting the child 'do what he likes' is an insidious one, since the children are encouraged to continue always at their original superficial level, without receiving guidance in study. Furthermore, the 'three Rs,' the fundamental tools, are neglected as long as possible, with the result that the child's chance to develop his mind is greatly retarded. The policy of teaching words via pictures instead of by the alphabet tends to deprive the young child of the greatest reasoning tool of all.

Not to go back is somewhat to advance, and men must walk, at least, before they dance.

Private Victory precedes Public Victory. Algebra comes before calculus.

When you're asked to fly a 747 you better at least be able to fly a Piper cub.

Learn the fundamentals of the game and stick to them. Band-Aid remedies never last.

I believe the alphabet is no longer considered an essential piece of equipment for traveling through life. In my day it was the keystone to knowledge. You learned the alphabet as you learned to count to ten, as you learned "Now I lay me" and the Lord's Prayer and your father's and mother's name and address and telephone number, all in case you were lost.

Every great artist must begin by learning to draw with the single line, and my advice to young animators is to learn how to live with that razor-sharp instrument or art. An artist who comes to me with eight or ten good drawings of the human figure in simple lines has a good chance of being hired. But I will tell the artist who comes with a bunch of drawings of Bugs Bunny to go back and learn how to draw the human body. An artist who knows that can learn how to draw ANYTHING, including Bugs Bunny.

It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set.

The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.

Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians.

Fundamentals - everybody has that. I definitely have that.

In martial arts, every time you graduate, move to another level, you don't forget everything you've done. You build on it, but it's always there.

I've been blessed that my dad taught me at a young age about versatility and how to not be specialized in one area, so it's made my transition from each step in my career very comfortable because I had the fundamentals and the foundation to do anything the coach needed me to do.

The subject of the lesson itself should not become more important that the underlying basis. Drawing thus provides first the written forms of letters and then their printed forms. Based on drawing, we build up to reading.

It might be good to be taught the basics like your stance when you first start playing.

I found great value in teaching students from the outset of their studies how to draw very realistically. Otherwise, you're starting deep into the alphabet instead of having started at the start. If you discard essential things like drawing, design, color and so on at the beginning, then you're just sort of floating out in space, without any basis to work from.