Exceptional Aptitude Quotes

Do you know how some people can do anything?” “What do you mean?” “I mean, you tell them to write a tune, they give you a symphony right there. You tell them to write a book, they write you a novel in a day. You tell them to move a spoon without touching it, they move it. If they want something, they make it happen. Miracles, almost.

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

Upper berth, lower berth, that's the difference between talent and genius.

There are probably very few people who have not at some time of their lives had some quality of genius. If they have not had such, it is probable that they have also been without great sorrow or great pain. They would have needed only to live sufficiently intently for a time for some quality to reveal itself. The poems of first love are a case in point, and certainly such love is a sufficient stimulus.

I know of no such thing as genius, genius is nothing but labor and diligence.

I'm loaded with talent.

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.

How many people can do what I do, anyways? A handful of guys?

Olivier was another case of a genius, who couldn't understand why anybody would have any trouble doing this, because for him it came so easily.

Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.

Look at the real prodigies, and I look like nothing compared to them.

Everyone has talent in the league.

Some people come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede -- not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above 14.

We have great managers who havent spent a day in management school. Do we have great surgeons that havent spent a day in surgical school?

Things that would have made fame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily.

The appearance of a single great genius is more than equivalent to the birth of a hundred mediocrities.

Literally, if you weren't the best in the world in my family, it wasn't impressive.

You could be a music prodigy at age 4, like Mozart, but you can't be a writing prodigy.