Talent

“ 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, going abroad only for audience, and spectator, as we adapt our voice and phrase to the distance and character of the ear we speak to. ”

“ I knew that my whole talent consisted in a certain warmth of mind with respect to the subjects of what I had to treat, and that nothing but the love of that which was great, beautiful and sublime, could animate my genius. ”

“ The arts, yes, but I am without talent. I play because I have been taught, and because I have practiced—oh, so hard! But God never intended that the world should hear me. I love painting and literature, and all those things. ”

“ You may know a vast number of useful facts, such as that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points—but such knowledge no more constitutes the Inborn Talent than such a definition constitutes literature. But ideas, big, vital ideas, of the compelling sort that force themselves into written words, in the face of obstacles and disappointments and the inertia of public indifference, are the very essence of the creative spirit, the golden hallmark of the Inborn Talent. ”

“ This lesson I write, my friends to incite;
⁠Their talents, however great,
That they must study with them unite,
⁠To duly cultivate.
The Flint gives light with the help of the Steel,
And study alone will talent reveal ”

“ The talent that is robust enough to front the every-day world and catch the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly face, need not fear the encounter, though it seems terrible to the sort nurtured in the superstition of the romantic, the bizarre, the heroic, the distinguished, as the things alone worthy of painting or carving or writing. ”

“ I should extol that superior talent which has never known the feelings of envy, that talent made happy by every success other than its own, that talent which, for ten years, has felt all that has happened to me of an honourable nature with the deep and simple joy known only to the most generous characters and the liveliest friendship. ”

“ Worldly fame, like a soap-bubble it shall collapse. A circus in Barcelona, a Crystal Palace in England, to these may be added a café chantant in Moscow, and the magic is dissolved. Talent! What is talent? People possess it so long as it is believed in. Talent is a bill at sight, it must be redeemed. It is little enough to possess talent alone; a singer must cease to begin when her voice begins to cease. There you have a few specimens; how do you like the colour? It is of a brilliant lustre, brilliant! That will create a sensation! ”

“ A very small amount of original talent may cut quite an imposing figure in the robes of the great masters. Require the poet to divest himself of them, and to speak in the language of men and in the spirit of real things, and see how he fares. ”

“ I thought, because you had attributed all the honor of the day to yourself alone, that you would be able to make as rapid progress in any other art. But if that is not the case, it seems to me that you cannot claim all the honor for yourself alone, for you have just admitted that success in any art requires, in the first place, talent. ”

“ But talent excels in practical sagacity; and hence those striking contrasts so often witnessed in the world—the triumph of talent through its adroit and active energies, and the adversities of genius in the midst of its boundless but unattainable aspirations. ”

“ He exemplified rather the talent than the genius of discovery, the patient sagacity which accumulates materials, rather than the fervid enthusiasm which traces the stream of nature's action to its spring, the great Creative Will. ”

“ Thus in him I met, for the first time in my life, a figure who was the incarnation of the ideal I had drawn for myself of the great man. This ideal had two sides; talent and character: great capacities and inflexibility. The men of great reputation whom I had met hitherto, artists and scientists, were certainly men richly endowed with talents; but I had never hitherto encountered a personality combining talents with gifts of character. ”

“ Talent has lined the walls with a hundred clever things, and could line miles of surface; genius gives us but one example, and the clever things are silenced. Here is the difference between that which expresses a noble idea, and that which is dexterously conventional. ”

“ And the genius who is discovered, forthwith starts his speeches of "talent"—though they are hardly that—they are hardly more than a string of subplatitudes, square-looking, well-rigged things that almost everybody has seen, known, and heard since Rome or man fell. ”

“ Talent, or facility in making use of thought, is dependent, in a great measure, on education and circumstance; while thought itself is immortal as the soul from which it radiates. Wherever we perceive a profound thought, however imperfectly expressed, we offer a higher homage than we can to commonplace thoughts, however beautiful, or if expressed with all that grace of art which it is often most easy for ordinary minds to acquire. ”

“ Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is. ”

“ Talent.—Talent of the highest order, and such as is calculated to command admiration, may exist apart from wisdom.—Robert Hall.
Whatever you are from nature, keep to it; never desert your own line of talent. Be what Nature intended you for, and you will succeed; be anything else, and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing.—Sydney Smith.
Talent without tact is only half talent.—Horace Greeley.
Talking.—Though we have two eyes, we are supplied with but one tongue. Draw your own moral.—Alphonse Karr. ”

“ I love best the strength of you which you use to control the charm—the untamed force of your personality which makes your talent seem just an incident—and the big, big virility of you!
"Do you think for a moment that you look like an artist? ”

“ And when we come to the original force of the word "talent" the matter is worse: a talent is a Greek coin used in the New Testament as a symbol of the mental capital committed to an individual at birth. ”

“ But as genius and a desire of fame are naturally allied, and, perhaps, the former never existed without the latter; will not the youthful adventurer be justified in endeavouring to stand well in the opinion of the judicious and discerning, by disseminating his works among them—under a confidence, that the more candid will be pleased with the first blossoms of poetical talent, not only as the fruits of industry, but as presages in maturer years of more elevated titles to distinction? ”

“ Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never. ”

“ Most of us have had moments of rapture before the glowing embodiment of the inspiration of some great artist, whose gifts have been developed to maturity by enthusiastic and patient striving for perfection. Do not these clumsy drawings, too, reveal that which, considering their environment, is talent—original and unacademic. ”

“ The profession demands conspicuous talent, intelligence, perseverance, energy, practice, knowledge, and, indeed, its highest attainment is impossible without the rare qualities of genius. The actor has not only to assimilate profoundly the spirit of the poet and the part he accepts, and to make his own individuality conform entirely to the same, both inwardly and outwardly ”

“ Not how much talent have I, but how much will to use the talent that I have, is the main question. Not how much do I know, but how much do I do with what I know? To do their great work the great ones need more of the very same habits which the little ones need to do their smaller work. ”

“ The true eye for talent presupposes the true reverence for it,—O Heavens, presupposes so many things! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Considered as a natural endowment, moreover, such talent reveals itself for the most part in early youth, and is manifested in the impelling restlessness that busies itself, with vivacity and industry, in creating shapes in some particular sensuous medium, and in seizing on this species of utterance and communication as the only one, or as the chief and the most suitable one. ”

“ Now mere talent, as critics say when they are lighting candles round a genius, mere talent would have hit upon pheasants as the natural sequitur, and then diverged to sports—a great theme, for it ensures a chorus of sneers at foreigners, and so on probably to a discussion of birds and beasts best adapted to enrapture the palate of man. ”

“ Do you plan to study medicine, or law, or to be a teacher? Whatever your plans may be, based on what you believe your best talent to be, do not let your talent go to waste like this oil did for so many years. Treasure it up, refine it, and in whatever direction God may lead you, you may be sure that you will have ample opportunity to let your talent bring greater brightness into the world. ”

“ Believe me, the talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well; and doing well whatever you do,--without a thought of fame. If it come at all, it will come because it is deserved, not because it is sought after. ”

“ Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure the eternal master found
The single talent well-employ'd. ”

“ But the perfection of the one talent, its care, its elaboration, have resulted in a corresponding decay of those other faculties by which alone, in the long run, poetry can live. Open him where you will, there is in his poetry neither construction nor proportion ”

“ My friend spoke it in blame that I could prize talent as well as genius; but why not? Do not Nature and God the same? The criticism of man should not disparage and displace, but appreciate and classify what it finds existent. Let me recognize talent as well as genius, understanding as well as reason, — but each in its place. ”

“ As for talent, that is an accessory which can do no harm, but after all, it is merely an accessory. Now, you have a good outside show; you have more talent than is necessary, there is only one thing in which you are faulty, you are not sufficiently intriguing. ”

“ This talent, strengthened with her increasing knowledge of books and its exercise, led her to think of the histrionic profession as one congenial with her feelings, and enabling her to give such utterance to her appreciations of her favorite poets, as would gratify her own ambition, and that of her friends for her. ”

“ I have just finished your story, and I cannot refrain from wishing you 'God-speed.' In spite of the deficiencies manifest in your work,—all technique must be learned,—it shows much decided talent, a strange mixture of grace and force. ”

“ This we infer, not so much from the degree, as from the kind of its excellence. There are compositions which indicate still greater talent, and which are perused with still greater delight, from which we should have drawn very different conclusions. ”

“ Or is it allowable, when our knowledge is sufficient, boldly and yet gently to insert the scalpel and show the weak points of the armour, the faulty joints between the talent and the soul? allowable to praise the talent whilst indicating the defects in the soul which actually affect the talent and any permanent influence it may exercise. Will literature lose by such a proceeding? It is possible that it may; but the science of psychology will gain. ”

“ To be more exact, Art, in so far as it generally becomes a particular art, and is exemplified for us in the real and definite appearance of its products, requires various accomplishments appropriate to the peculiar modes of its realization. Such forms of executive versatility we may call with propriety talent, as we may say that anyone possesses a talent for perfect playing on the violin, or anyone else for singing. ”

“ I say that if certain qualities vary normally, such and such will be the results; that these qualities are of a class that are found, whenever they have been tested, to vary normally to a fair degree of approximation, and consequently we may infer that our results are trustworthy indications of real facts.
A talent is a sum whose exact value few of us care to know, although we all appreciate the inner sense of the beautiful parable. ”

“ The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and what was talent but the art of being completely what ever it was that one happened to be? ”