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Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .
Oct 1, 2025
What I want to do is, I want to put together a nice list of those guys who I really did admire when I was growing up, listening to names like Lord Finesse.
Two out of every three goals you score come from checking. One out of every three comes from sheer finesse.
Once I grew up and realised 'What am I doing?' I started re-listening to the music I was playing and I realised there was so much finesse - it was dynamic and simple but I wanted to be authentic to the original songs.
The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.
[My boys] they're all different. Jackie was very competitive. He was a tough kid - a little bit like Nick. Steve was sort of a finesse guy. He was a little bit like Nick - if he could touch it, he'd catch it. He played wide receiver at Florida State. Then, Gary came along and Gary was more my size.
I'm not a writer because I want to make money. I'm a writer because I'm a very slow thinker, but I do care about thinking, and the only way I know how to think with any kind of finesse is by telling stories.
And they'll vote for me because I'm the best liar, because I do it honestly, with a certain finesse. They know that lies and truth are very close, and that something beautiful rests between.
I've been hit on plenty of times, mostly by men with little finesse who thought what was between their legs made up for what they lacked between their ears.
The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head
I don't play with a lot of finesse. I usually play like I'm breaking out of jail!
Some players are more physical than others, some play with more finesse. Some are just really great all-around players. So you have to change your game.
Im a finesse pitcher without the finesse.
I don't know what my label is. I just think of myself as a plain forward. I like to think I have some finesse to my game, but inside the paint is where men are made. If you can't play there, you should be home with your mama.
Nature has given to each conscious being every power she possesses, and one of these abilities is this: just as Nature converts and alters every obstacle and opposition, and fits them into their predestined place, making them a part of herself, so too the rational person is able to finesse every obstacle into an opportunity, and to use it for whatever purpose it may suit.
Il y a deux sortes d'esprits, l'un ge ome trique, et l'autre que l'on peut appeler de finesse. Le premier a des vues lentes, dures et inflexibles; mais le dernier a une souplesse de pense e. There are two kinds of mind, one mathematical, the other what one might call the intuitive. The first takes a slow, firm, inflexible view, but the latter has flexibility of thought.
It's best if you can do things with a sense of humor and finesse.
To live means to finesse the processes to which one is subjugated.
You spend enough time on set as an actor and it's great when a director was at some point an actor or understands acting. They're able to finesse performances out of you that a lot directors can't get.
It was actually drumming that gave me the stamina to get into sports later. I started playing drums at 13, and when I got to the international touring level... I got interested in cross-country skiing, long-distance swimming, bicycling... things that require stamina, not finesse.
It was actually drumming that gave me the stamina to get into sports later.
People seek methods of learning to know God. Is it not much shorter and more direct to simply do everything for the love of Him? There is no finesse about it. One only has to do it generously and simply.
Never do what a specialist can do better. Discover your own specialty. Do not despair if your specialty appears to be more delicate, a lesser thing. Make up in finesse what you lose in force.
Being a part of the finesse and physicality of box lacrosse has been a great experience for me. I feel that I have learned and improved as an overall lacrosse player. Learning to adapt in tight space while reading defenders and offensive players has been the biggest improvement in my game.
To read of a detective's daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy.
Thinking is the subtlest form of self-polemics, the art of a certain finesse in psychological self-vivisection and self-crucifixion (Hegel of course called the path of self-disillusion the via dolorosa or "highway of despair," in Baillie's fine and florid rendering, like Jesus' route to Golgotha).
People vastly overestimate the ability of central planners to improve on the independent action of diverse individuals. What I've learned watching regulators is that they almost always make things worse. If regulators did nothing, the self-correcting mechanisms of the market would mitigate most problems with more finesse. And less cost.
Digital has obviously changed things a lot, but not all for the better as far as I'm concerned. Of course it's much more convenient and you're getting instant results, but to me it just lacks the finesse of a roll of film and it has a slightly superimposed feel.
Nicky Egan has the finesse of Bonnie Raitt merged with the primal force of Janis Joplin. It is a rare combination. Her passion is a joy to behold - and her talent is undeniable. She belongs in any conversation about great contemporary female soul singers. If you're up for a revelatory evening, then put her high on your list.
The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One would not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play.
Any old coach will say the game was meant for finesse. It's a beautiful game, especially on television.
A man always mistakes a woman's clinging devotion for weakness, until he discovers that it requires the strength of Samson, the patience of Job, and the finesse of Solomon to untwine it.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is just perfect in 'Veep.' She gets to show off the spiky claws beneath her patrician finesse. The obvious way to play 'Veep' would be to make Louis-Dreyfus a folksy heroine, one with more common sense or populist heart than her enemies. But she isn't one.
Food's delicate. You have to handle it with finesse. You can't just be a big ogre.
The music of all the different media of life-memories, images, feeling-tones, poetic-musical connotations of phrasing-is kaleidoscopic and doesn't repeat itself or recur. -People who think they are trapped in a river of regularized and ever-repeating time are merely the victims of their own ordinarizing minds that have elaborated for them a prison-cell of everydayness. The fountains of time, history, life, inspiration, etc. are fresh every instant, if one knows how to grasp them with some finesse: every instant within natural, historical, and personal time is unique.
I see more now. As far as concepts, I know where teammates are going, linemen are going. I can read defensive fronts. I can read the body language of linebackers. I study film to see who's a bull rusher and who's a finesse rusher. I think I've learned.
The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head--no intricate game of chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness and ends are attained by indirection, an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle burnt out in playing it.
In terms of playing, of course, Europe is definitely more finesse than playing in the WNBA. I think they're more skilled in terms of the overall ability. And here in the States, in the WNBA, we just kind of play off athleticism and just play.
Her professors were astonished by her leaps of thought, by the finesse and elegance of her insights. She arrived at hypotheses by sheer intuition and with what eventually one of her mentors described as an almost alarming speed; she was like a dancer, he said, out in the cosmos springing weightlessly from star to star. Drones, merely brilliant, crawled along behind with laborious proofs that supported her assertions.
The politics of courts are so mean that private people would be ashamed to act in the same way; all is trick and finesse, to which the common cause is sacrificed.
Comics play a trite but lusty tune on the C natural keys of human nature. They rouse the most primitive, but also the most powerful, reverberations in the noisy cranial sound-box of consciousness, drowning out more subtle symphonies. Comics scorn finesse, thereby incurring the wrath of linguistic adepts. They defy the limits of accepted fact and convention, thus amortizing to apoplexy the ossified arteries of routine thought.
The Russians are a little stronger, but they excel at the basics. Lock the hands, bear hugs, takedowns, riding are all strong points for them, whereas Americans tend to have more finesse and take more risks. They might let you up in order to hit something else, and that's completely different from the Russian approach.
I learned to approach racing like a game of billiards. If you bash the ball too hard, you get nowhere. As you handle the cue properly, you drive with more finesse.
The apex of perfection in equestrian art is not an exhibition of a great deal of different airs and movements by the same horse, but rather the conservation of the horse's enjoyment, suppleness and finesse during the performance, which calls for comparison with the finest ballet, or performance of an orchestra, or seeing a play by Racine, so moving is the sight of perfectly unisoned movements.
I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.
The Adderall Diaries is phenomenal. With jittery finesse and a reformed tweaker's eye for detail, Stephen Elliott captures the terrifying, hilarious, heart-strangling reality of a life whose scorched-earth physical and psycho-emotional dimensions no one could have invented - they absolutely had to be lived. By all rights, the author should either be dead or chewing his fingers in a bus station. Instead, he may well have written the memoir of an entire generation.
Finesse is the best adaptation of means to circumstances.
I approach playing acoustic guitar more of as a percussive instrument. It's fragile. I don't have a lot of finesse when it comes to my guitar playing.
One answer to why public interest in men's tennis has been on the wane in recent years is an essential and unpretty thugishness about the power-baseline style that's become dominant on the tour. Watch Agassi closely sometime...he's amazingly absent of finesse, with movements that look more like a heavy-metal musician's than an athlete's...what a top PBer really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It's awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty.
All my friends are always telling me how hard it is to have kids. 'Oh, David, it's so hard.' That's not hard. I'll tell you what hard is. Try talking your girlfriend into her third consecutive abortion. Yeah, that's hard, that takes finesse. You're just inconvenienced.