Isaac Asimov Quotes

It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry. If they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere and keep on working until the work is done... I bet there isn't a single highly successful person who has not depended on grit. Nobody is talented enough to not have to work hard, and that's what grit allows you to do.

Talent is long patience.

Many successful people are no more talented than unsuccessful people. The difference between them lies in the old axiom that successful people do those things that unsuccessful people don't like to do.

Finish what you start. Keep submitting until it sells.

The big talent is persistence.

Effort without talent is a depressing situation... but talent without effort is a tragedy.

It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.

My dad has always been really helpful. He taught me that talent is a bonus, but persistence is what wins out.

If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.

Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.

Hard work pays off - hard work beats talent any day, but if you're talented and work hard, it's hard to be beat.

I'm a big believer in persistence, don't be greedy and, above all, work hard. It's what keeps me going.

If you work harder than somebody else, chances are you'll beat him though he has more talent than you.

At the end of the day, you can have all the talent in the world. But if you don't put in the work, nothing works. The engine doesn't start going. It's a car without gas.

If there's one thing I know, it's to work hard, continue to work hard, and the rest will come.

If you're talented and hardworking, great - good for you. You're gonna make it; you're gonna go places. But if you're talented and don't have the work element behind it, the guy that works harder is going to eventually outpace you and outrun you.

You don't achieve success by "taking it easy" or "working on it later." You achieve it thru persistence and hard work.

People who want to write either do it or they don't. At last I began to say that my most important talent - or habit - was persistence. Without it, I would have given up writing long before I finished my first novel. It's amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up.

Nothing any good isn't hard.

People I know who succeed don't mind working. Those who are competent seem to like doing things well -- not stopping because they haven't accomplished what they wanted to on the first go-round. They're willing to do it twenty times, if necessary. There's an illusion that the good people can easily do something, and it's not necessarily true. They're just determined to do it right. I was impressed by hearing one of the women at Radcliffe talk about writing a poem, how many revisions a single poem sometimes has to go through -- fifty or sixty revisions to come out with a poem sixteen lines long.

TALENT PROVIDES HOPE FOR ACCOMPLISHMENT, BUT PERSEVERANCE GUARANTEES IT.

It doesn't take talent to work hard.

Seeking is all very well, but holding requires greater talent: Seeking involves some luck; now the demand is for skill.

Success comes from doing the hard part. When the hard part is all you've got, you're more likely to do it. And this is precisely why it's difficult to focus. Because focusing means acknowledging that you just signed up for the hard part.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.