1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)
Context: Our English careers to born genius are twofold. There is the silent or unlearned career of the Industrialisms, which are very many among us; and there is the articulate or learned career of the three professions, Medicine, Law (under which we may include Politics), and the Church. Your born genius, therefore, will first have to ask himself, Whether he can hold his tongue or cannot? True, all human talent, especially all deep talent, is a talent to do, and is intrinsically of silent nature; inaudible, like the Sphere Harmonies and Eternal Melodies, of which it is an incarnated fraction.
Rolling Stone Issue No. 213 (May 20, 1976) on Charlie Chaplin
“You can do something with talent, but nothing with genius….”
Quoted in Jack Fishman's My Darling Clementine, the biography of Winston Churchill's wife. (p. 131).
“Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.”
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Journal
“The moment of recognizing your own lack of talent is a flash of genius.”
Unkempt Thoughts (1957), p. 116
“If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.”
Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Ch. 18
Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 112.
As quoted in Walt Disney, Magician of the Movies (1966) by Bob Thomas p. 116
Context: A person should set his goals as early as he can and devote all his energy and talent to getting there. With enough effort, he may achieve it. Or he may find something that is even more rewarding. But in the end, no matter what the outcome, he will know he has been alive.
1840s, Past and Present (1843)
“The talent works, the genius creates.”
Attributed to Schumann in: The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 112, 1913, p. 811
“Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.”
Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890), Rousseau and the Sentimentalists
