A Quote by John Dryden

Genius must be born, it can't be taught. — © John Dryden
Genius must be born, it can't be taught.

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Genius must be born, and never can be taught.
Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought, but genius must be born; and never can be taught.
Babies aren't born knowing differences in color, gender, religions. They're taught those things. They're taught them at home. They're taught in the schools. They're taught in the churches. They're taught in the mosques, in the synagogues.
Pun was just a natural-born genius with music, and he basically taught me so many tricks on how to make better music, even though I was the one that discovered him. He was so far advanced than me; he taught me a lot.
Genius is its own reward; for the best that one is, one must necessarily be for oneself. . . . Further, genius consists in the working of the free intellect., and as a consequence the productions of genius serve no useful purpose. The work of genius may be music, philosophy, painting, or poetry; it is nothing for use or profit. To be useless and unprofitable is one of the characteristics of genius; it is their patent of nobility.
If we’re born to inquire, then why must it be taught?
The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel. It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.
One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.
A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark.
I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people's misery, to eat my own bitterness. And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.
My Dad taught me that the English upper class are sent to school to be taught to be confident, whereas in Glasgow you're born confident. I've always thought that pretty much summed me up. Born confident.
Talk not of genius baffled. Genius is master of man. Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.
Many now born, by the time they are voters will compose part of a nation with a genius nowhere equaled, and with a vast territory upon which those energies and that genius can operate.
You're not born knowing how to do math. You're taught that. You're not born knowing how to hate someone. You're taught that. And so I feel I want to use my platform to raise awareness about it. To help raise something positive. In America, you look around and a lot of things that happen - it all stems from that.
Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. The genius is a man who knows everything without having learned it.
I regret that I must so continually use the word genius, as if that should apply only to a caste as well defined from those below as income-tax payers are from the untaxed. The word genius was very probably invented by a man who had small claims on it himself; greater men would have understood better what to be a genius really was, and probably they would have come to see that the word could be applied to most people. Goethe said that perhaps only a genius is able to understand a genius.
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