A Quote by Janet Flanner

Genius is a talent only for living, those who possess it have little gift for dying.

Janet Flanner

Quote Topics

Dying Genius Gift Little Living Only Possess Talent Those

Quote Author

Janet Flanner
American - Journalist
March 13, 1892 - November 7, 1978

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

The very best reason parents are so special . . . is because we are the holders of a priceless gift, a gift we received from countless generations we never knew, a gift that only we now possess and only we can give to our children. That unique gift, of course, is the gift of ourselves. Whatever we can do to give that gift, and to help others receive it, is worth the challenge of all our human endeavor.

Fred Rogers

Superficial knowledge ... is hurtful to those who possess true genius; for it necessarily draws them away from their main object, wastes their industry over details and subjects foreign to their needs and natural talent, and lastly does not serve, as they flatter themselves, to prove the breadth of their mind. In all ages there have been men of very moderate intelligence who knew much, and so on the contrary, men of the highest intelligence who knew very little. Ignorance is not lack of intelligence, nor knowledge a proof of genius.

Luc de Clapiers

Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you.

Malcolm Cowley

We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.

Chuck Klosterman

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

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

He was one of those men who possess almost every gift, except the gift of the power to use them.

Charles Kingsley

I truly believe we all have a sleeping giant within us. Each of us has a talent, a gift, our own bit of genius just waiting to be tapped. It might be a talent for art or music... a special way of relating to the ones you love. It might be a genius for selling or innovating.... I choose to believe that our Creator doesn't play favorites, that we've all been created unique, but with equal opportunities for experiencing life to the fullest.

Tony Robbins

Living is the challenge. Not dying. Dying is so easy. Sometimes it only takes ten seconds to die. But living? That can take you eighty years and you do something in that time.

Melina Marchetta

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.