Top 79 Quotes About Talent And Genius
#1. Modest expression is a beautiful setting to the diamond of talent and genius.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#2. Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.
Truman Capote
#3. There is the same difference between talent and genius that there is between a stone mason and a sculptor
Robert Green Ingersoll
#4. Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue.
Andre Breton
#5. The purpose of America is to unleash the full talent and genius of every individual.
Ronald Reagan
#6. Probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for perhaps those times when Thomas Jefferson ate alone.
John F. Kennedy
#7. That difference, that indefinable difference between talent and genius. It is as fine as hair, invisible to the eye and even, most of the time, to the ear. But in her face when she looks at her brother, I see that it may as well be a huge uncrossable chasm.
Anna Smaill
#8. Upper berth, lower berth, that's the difference between talent and genius.
George Gershwin
#9. The distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and uses; genius combines and creates.
Anna Brownell Jameson
#11. The difference between talent and genius is this: while the former usually develops some special branch of our faculties, the latter commands them all. When the former is combined with tact, it is often more than a match for the latter.
Benjamin Disraeli
#12. Talent and genius operate outside the rules, and theory conflicts with practice.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#13. That genius is a rare exception ( It's not true. Talent and genius have been wasted on enormous scale throughout our history; this is all I know for sure.
Eric Hoffer
#14. It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women.
Louisa May Alcott
#15. If, by chance, someone among those men of extraordinary talent is found who has firmness of soul and who refuses to yield to the genius of his age and to debase himself with childish works, woe unto him! He will die in poverty and oblivion.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#16. Talent warms-up the given (as they say in cookery) and makes it apparent; genius brings something new. But our time lets talent pass for genius. They want to abolish the genius, deify the genius, and let talent forge ahead.
Soren Kierkegaard
#17. It is only occasional that talent becomes genius - radiating sparks, brilliance, energy, and charismatic magnetism ... such a talent was Janis Joplin.
Clive Davis
#18. Genius is a bend in the creek where bright water has gathered, and which mirrors the trees, the sky and the banks. It just does that because it is there and the scenery is there. Talent is a fine mirror with a silver frame, with the name of the owner engraved on the back.
Edgar Lee Masters
#19. Music resembles poetry, in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach,
And which a master hand alone can reach.
Alexander Pope
#21. Talent, will and genius are natural phenomena like the lake, the volcano, the mountain, the wind, the star, the cloud.
George Sand
#22. You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.
Louisa May Alcott
#23. If a great mansion is located in a wrong environment, it loses its real value! So it is, when a great and true genius fails to get the right stage, its real value is least seen!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#24. Some people today are wandering generalities instead of meaningful specifics because they have failed to discover and mine the wealth of potentials in them.
Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
#25. And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of the flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new picture or copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: it proceeds from within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#26. The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.
Quentin Crisp
#27. A genius of comedy His talent brought joy and Laughter to all the world.
Oliver Hardy
#28. When a man has displayed talent in some particular path, and left all competitors behind him in it, the world are too apt to give him credit for universality of genius, and to anticipate for him success in all that he undertakes.
Charles Caleb Colton
#29. Talent and success are cousins;
genius and excellence are twins.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#30. Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#31. There's a lot of controversy online, some people say i'm a genius and other say i'm hugely talented.
Andy Kindler
#32. Genius must have talent as its complement and implement, just as in like manner imagination must have fancy. In short, the higher intellectual powers can only act through a corresponding energy of the lower.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#33. I intend to work for this dance of the future. I do not know whether I have the necessary qualities; I may have neither genius nor talent nor temperament. But I know that I have a Will; and will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament.
Isadora Duncan
#34. And after all, if stupidity did not, when seen from within, look so exactly like talent as to be mistaken for it, and if it could not, when seen from the outside, appear as progress, genius, hope, and improvement, doubtless no one would want to be stupid, and there would be no stupidity.
Robert Musil
#35. A person with average talent, ambition and education, can outstrip a genius in society, if that person has focused goals.
Brian Tracy
#36. Good sense is at the bottom of everything: virtue, genius, wit, talent and taste.
Joseph Chenier
#37. Knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius, and
Arthur Conan Doyle
#38. A man of talent will strive for money and reputation; but the spring that moves genius to the production of its works is not as easy to name
Arthur Schopenhauer
#39. This man has talent, that man genius
And here's the strange and cruel difference:
Talent gives pence and his reward is gold,
Genius gives gold and gets no more than pence.
W.H. Davies
#40. Talent finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#41. In my experience there are few people who are of true genius. There are many who are gifted, but most of the world's work and great things come from ordinary people with a talent which they develop.
James E. Faust
#42. If talent is a natural aptitude for creation with an outlook on life peculiar to oneself, then genius is to have an outlook on life, peculiar to oneself, which yet appeals to everybody. Talent is for oneself and a few others, but genius is universal.
D.E. Stevenson
#43. Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.
William Hazlitt
#44. It is the curse of talent that, although it labors with greater steadiness and perseverance than genius, it does not reach its goal, while genius already on the summit of the ideal, gazes laughingly about.
Robert Schumann
#45. And just as some people have obvious moral deficits, others must possess moral talent, moral expertise, and even moral genius. As with any human ability, these gradations must be expressed at the level of the brain. Game
Sam Harris
#46. ... because talent isn't genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing.
Louisa May Alcott
#47. Realism to be effective must be a matter of selection.genius chooses its materials with a view to their beauty and effectiveness; mere talent copies what it thinks is nature, only to find it has been deceived by the external grossness of things.
Julia Marlowe
#48. Character is greater than talent, genius, fame, money, friends - there is nothing to compare with it. A man may have all these and yet remain comparatively useless - be unhappy - and die a bankrupt in soul.
George Matthew Adams
#50. The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement.
Anna Garlin Spencer
#51. By and large, talent is in such short supply that mediocrity can be taken for brilliance rather more than genius can go undiscovered.
Charles Saatchi
#54. Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
Vladimir Nabokov
#55. The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands.
Beth Kephart
#56. Genius is talent provided with ideals. Genius starves while talent wears purple and fine linen. The man of genius of today will infifty years' time be in most cases no more than a man of talent.
W. Somerset Maugham
#57. An average person with average talent, ambition and education can outstrip the most brilliant genius in our society, if that person has clear, focused goals.
Brian Tracy
#58. If genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, then as a culture we tend to lionize the one percent.
Susan Cain
#59. A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.
Truman Capote
#60. We're all geniuses. Life is merely overpopulated with singers who play drums, and, drummers who sing, to pay rent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#61. When I had to fill in my immigration papers, I gave my age as 19, and my profession as genius; I added that I had nothing to declare except my talent.
Oscar Wilde
#62. There's a perceived inverse relation between looks and talent. Look at Charlize Theron - she made herself ugly for 'Monster' and suddenly everyone said 'she's a genius.' It shouldn't be like that.
Lena Headey
#63. It's a good thing I'm a professional and could see the pure genius talent behind the raw sexual beauty.
Zach Braff
#64. To carry feelings of childhood into the powers of adulthood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish it from talent.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#65. What men want is not talent, it is purpose; in other words, not the power to achieve, but will to labor. I believe that labor judiciously and continuously applied becomes genius.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
#66. A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius.
Charles Horton Cooley
#67. In Mozart and Salieri we see the contrast between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does what it can.
Maurice Baring
#68. We must have recourse to the rules of music when our genius and our ear seem to deny what we are seeking.
Jean-Philippe Rameau
#69. I've met some real talents that were ... real talents and I've met some real talents that were incredible people.People like Al Williamson, Gray Morrow, to a certain extent Jim Steranko, who is an institution all to himself. What a talent. What a genius talent.
Mike Royer
#70. Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.
Carl Jung
#71. Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.
Jean De La Bruyere
#72. Skill gives you the sky,
talent gives you the stars,
and genius gives you the universe.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#73. Love can reach the same level of talent, and even genius, as the discovery of differential calculus.
Lev Vygotsky
#74. The most exciting thing about women's liberation is that this century will be able to take advantage of talent and potential genius that have been wasted because of taboos.
Helen Reddy
#75. The most mesmerizing of artists is always like one who was merely drawing in the sand and people came to watch.
Criss Jami
#76. Talent I say is what an actor needs. And talent is faith in oneself, one's own powers.
Maxim Gorky
#77. It is not the color of the skin that makes the man or the woman, but the principle formed in the soul. Brilliant wit will shine, come from whence it will; and genius and talent will not hide the brightness of its lustre.
Maria W. Stewart
#78. Emotion is always multiplied in the art of a person who doesn't really show much emotion. It once expanded deep within his hidden soul, and following the downplay his audience is blown away.
Criss Jami
#79. We love and understand talent; we wish it be within us. The truly gifted, those exceptional few, must wait for the world to catch up.
John Donne
