Famous Quotes about Talent (52 Quotations)

It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death does.

No one respects a talent that is concealed.

Ordinary people think that talent must be always on its own level and that it arises every morning like the sun, rested and refreshed, ready to draw from the same storehouse — always open, always full, always abundant — new treasures that it will heap up on those of the day before; such people are unaware that, as in the case of all mortal things, talent has its increase and decrease, and that independently of the career it takes, like everything that breathes… it undergoes all the accidents of health, of sickness, and of the dispositions of the soul — its gaiety or its sadness. As with our perishable flesh. talent is obliged constantly to keep guard over itself, to combat, and to keep perpetually on the alert amid the obstacles that witness the exercise of its singular power.

Premature development of the powers of both mind and body leads to an early grave.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.

Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.

Talent for talent's sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

Talent is a matter of quantity. Talent does not write on page, it writes three hundred.

Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.

Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting — intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one's own experience and sensations, to make one's self heard and seen.

Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.

Talent is nothing but a prolonged period of attention and a shortened period of mental assimilation.

Talent is only the starting point.

Talent is something, but tact is everything. It is the interpreter of all riddles, the surmounter of all difficulties, the remover of all obstacles.

Talent isn't genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing. I won't be a commonplace dauber, so I don't intend to try any more.

Talent works, genius creates.

Talents go by nature not by birth.

The American white man (not to speak of the Indian, the Negro, the Mexican) hasn't a ghost of a chance. If he has any talent he's doomed to have it crushed one way or another. The American way is to seduce a man by bribery and make a prostitute of him. Or else to ignore him, starve him into submission and make a hack of him.