Quotes About Talent

Talent is nurtured in solitude; character is formed in the stormy billows of the world.

Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. You must be able to sustain yourself against staggering blows. There is no code of conduct to help beginners. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go much further than people with vastly superior talent.

Nothing is so common as unsuccessful men with talent. They lack only determination.

Some say, compared to Bononcini, That Mynheer Handel's but a ninny; Others aver, that he to Handel Is scarcely fit to hold a candle: Strange all this difference should be, 'Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.

There are a lot of fellas with all the ability it takes to play in the major leagues, but... they always get stuck in the minor leagues because they haven't got the guts to make the climb.

Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads.

You can't have genius without patience.

Genius is eternal patience.

Great ability without discretion comes almost invariably to a tragic end.

He is . . . like many other geniuses, a greater friend to the bottle, than the bottle is to him.

The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.

The defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces.

Doing easily what others find is difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.

We define genius as the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.

Men of genius are the worst possible models for men of talent.

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede - not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen.

Genius is only great patience.

Gift, like genius, I often think only means an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.

The lamp of genius burns quicker than the lamp of life.

Acting is happy agony.

Orthodox criticism ... is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the first ones to get killed off.