Top 100 Talent Genius Quotes
#1. 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
#2. A man possesses talent; genius possesses the man.
Isaac Stern
#4. It's a good thing I'm a professional and could see the pure genius talent behind the raw sexual beauty.
Zach Braff
#5. Marriage requires a special talent, like acting. Monogamy requires genius.
Warren Beatty
#6. Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.
Truman Capote
#7. There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#8. 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
#10. 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
#11. We're all geniuses. Life is merely overpopulated with singers who play drums, and, drummers who sing, to pay rent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#13. Talent is the ability to say things well, but genius is the ability to, well, say things.
Steve Martin
#14. Bow to genius, but to the authority of that genius - not the display of talent ...
John Geddes
#15. Pseudo-artists think that being an artist means opposing whatever seems to be an establishment. That is not creative at all. True creativity is the ability to gain perspective wherever you may have missed it before.
Criss Jami
#17. 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
#18. 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
#22. Talent shuffles the deck. Genius brings a new deck.
Mason Cooley
#26. Talent is hereditary; it may be the common possession of a whole family (eg, the Bach family); genius is not transmitted; it is never diffused, but is strictly individual.
Otto Weininger
#27. 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
#28. Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#29. It is not because the touch of genius has roused genius to production, but because the admiration of genius has made talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant.
Margaret Fuller
#30. Genius is a talent only for living, those who possess it have little gift for dying.
Janet Flanner
#31. God gives talent. Work transforms talent into genius.
Anna Pavlova
#32. Talent is a faculty that is highly developed, but genius commands all the faculties.
Francis Herbert Hedge
#33. Genius is the talent for seeing things straight.
Maude Adams
#34. Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#36. True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius.
Felix Schelling
#37. Genius can write on the back of old envelopes but mere talent requires the finest stationery available.
Dorothy Parker
#39. 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
#40. Talent will take you to the mountaintop. Genius will take you to the edge of the universe.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#41. Talent or skill wasn't how you recognized a genius. A genius was the person giving the world the eff-you salute while doing the impossible.
Rae Mariz
#42. The distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and uses; genius combines and creates.
Anna Brownell Jameson
#43. There is in the DNA of the Italians a bit of madness, which in the overwhelming majority of cases is positive. It is genius. It is talent. It's the masterpieces of art. It's the food, fashion, everything that makes Italy great in the world.
Matteo Renzi
#44. How are men to be secured in any rights without instruction; how to be secured in the equal exercise of those rights without equality of instruction? By instruction understand me to mean knowledge - just knowledge; not talent, not genius, not inventive mental powers.
Frances Wright
#45. Talent is a spring from which fresh water is constantly flowing. But this spring loses its value if it is not used in the right way.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#46. Love can reach the same level of talent, and even genius, as the discovery of differential calculus.
Lev Vygotsky
#47. 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
#48. The most mesmerizing of artists is always like one who was merely drawing in the sand and people came to watch.
Criss Jami
#51. Upper berth, lower berth, that's the difference between talent and genius.
George Gershwin
#52. I was fortunate to be able to do two movies with Harold Ramis. He was the kindest of any director with whom I worked. Harold was a genius. On top of his talent, he could do the 'New York Times' crossword puzzle faster than anyone! I am lucky to have known him as well as I did. I will miss him.
Andie MacDowell
#53. 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
#55. Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.
James Russell Lowell
#56. Intelligence is to genius as the whole is in proportion to its part.
Jean De La Bruyere
#57. It is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.
Pablo Picasso
#58. Talent does things tolerably well; genius does then intolerably better
Elbert Hubbard
#59. I adopted the theory of reincarnation when I was 26. Genius is experience. Some think to seem that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives
Henry Ford
#60. It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes," [T.S. Eliot] wrote, "who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.
Ross Wetzsteon
#61. I am so thankful for the genius of Phil Spector, for his recognition of my talent to be the main voice of his Wall of Sound.
Darlene Love
#62. Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life ... I have put only my talent into my works.
Oscar Wilde
#64. Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#65. With the offspring of genius, the law of parturition is reversed; the throes are in the conception, the pleasure in the birth.
Charles Caleb Colton
#66. 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
#68. To do what others cannot do is talent. To do what talent cannot do is genius.
Henry Wilson Allen
#69. 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
#71. 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
#73. It is possible that the production of genius is reserved to a limited period of mankind's history.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#74. Skill is in your mind.
Talent is in your heart.
Genius is in your soul.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#75. Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#76. Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.
Eugene Delacroix
#77. Talent, will and genius are natural phenomena like the lake, the volcano, the mountain, the wind, the star, the cloud.
George Sand
#78. Talent helps mankind leap years.
Brilliance helps mankind leap decades.
Genius helps mankind leap centuries.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#81. Talent is essential, but cash buys the opportunity for that talent to be discovered. To pretend otherwise is to spit in the face of every broke genius.
Molly Crabapple
#82. Hendrix was a natural genius who played many beautiful styles. Talent as great as his doesn't come through life very frequently. Hendrix was one in a billion.
Alex Lifeson
#83. Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue.
Andre Breton
#84. It is only occasional that talent becomes genius - radiating sparks, brilliance, energy, and charismatic magnetism ... such a talent was Janis Joplin.
Clive Davis
#86. 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
#88. Talent is like a marksman who hits a target which others cannot
reach; genius is like a marksman who hits a target which others cannot see.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#89. 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
#91. There is the same difference between talent and genius that there is between a stone mason and a sculptor
Robert Green Ingersoll
#92. Knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius, and
Arthur Conan Doyle
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Put your talent into your work, but your genius into your life.
Oscar Wilde
#96. 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
#97. I put my talent in my work, I save my Genius for my life.
Oscar Wilde
#99. ... because talent isn't genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing.
Louisa May Alcott
#100. Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine.
Arthur Schopenhauer
