Talent has the power to transform ideas into reality, drive innovation, and inspire greatness. Whether you're seeking motivation to nurture your own abilities or looking to celebrate the exceptional gifts of others, these carefully selected talent quotes offer insight and encouragement. Dive into this collection of 86 inspiring sayings that highlight the beauty, potential, and impact of talent in all its forms.
1. “Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.” - Erica Jong
2. “According to this law [the law of Dharma], you have a unique talent and a unique way of expressing it. There is something that you can do better than anyone else in the whole world--and for every unique talent and unique expression of that talent, there are also unique needs. When these needs are matched with the creative expression of your talent, that is the spark that creates affluence. Expressing your talents to fulfill needs creates unlimited wealth and abundance.” - Deepak Chopra
3. “Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.” - Gustave Flaubert
4. “Every artist was first an amateur.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
5. “Hide not your talents, they for use were made,What's a sundial in the shade?” - Benjamin Franklin
6. “The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it. ” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
7. “Your talent determines what you can do. Your motivation determines how much you are willing to do. Your attitude determines how well you do it.” - Lou Holtz
8. “Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.” - Arthur Conan Doyle
9. “Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.” - Pope John Paul II
10. “Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” - Stephen King
11. “Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
12. “The world loves talent but pays off on character.” - John W. Gardner
13. “We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities but its own talents.” - Eric Hoffer
14. “Human tragedies:We all want to be extraordinaryand we all just want to fit in.Unfortunately, extraordinary people rarely fit in.” - Sebastyne Young
15. “Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter. ” - Stephen King
16. “...how absurd human beings are and how magnificent.” - Benjamin Zander
17. “If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.” - Haruki Murakami
18. “A familiar name on its own, however, does not carry its bearer far unless the talent is there, and the will to work.” - Daphne du Maurier
19. “Listen," Mac interrupted, "you still have to knock it out of the park. But it's a degree-of-difficulty thing. You're doing a triple lutz and she's skating. You're the Sasha Cohen here.” - Zoey Dean
20. “Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.” - Laura Kasischke
21. “Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.” - Russell Brand
22. “Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.” - David Foster Wallace
23. “Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not have talent; one can be called and not know how to go.” - Benjamin Moser
24. “Money follows art. Money wants what it can't buy. Class and talent. And remember while there's a talent for making money, it takes real talent to know how to spend it.” - Candace Bushnell
25. “The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.” - Marge Piercy
26. “I also wish I'd been born with a clearly defined talent for something, or else stupid.” - James Hamilton-Paterson
27. “At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance. That is, to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is ... curiosity to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does. And if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got that or not.[Press conference, University of Virginia, May 20, 1957]” - William Faulkner
28. “The trouble in life is not that you are extraordinarily or ordinarily talented but you are read posthumously.” - Santosh Kalwar
29. “Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.” - Irving Stone
30. “There is, perhaps, no more dangerous man in the world than the man with the sensibilities of an artist but without creative talent. With luck such men make wonderful theatrical impresarios and interior decorators, or else they become mass murderers or critics.” - Dame Edna Everage
31. “I Came away from the U.S. Memory Championship eager to find out how Ed and Lukas did it. Were these just extraordinary individuals, pridigies from the long tail of humanity's bell curve, or was there something we could all learn from their talents?” - joshua foer
32. “…because talent isn't genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing.” - Louisa May Alcott
33. “Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.” - Brenda Ueland
34. “...You can do something extraordinary, and something that a lot of people can't do. And if you have the opportunity to work on your gifts, it seems like a crime not to. I mean, it's just weakness to quit because something becomes too hard...” - Morgan Matson
35. “Talent is nothing without persistence.” - Dean Crawford
36. “Adams has shown a nearly inexhaustible desire, leavened with an equal amount of sheer talent- five decades' worth and counting- in an unrelenting effort to stabilize, strengthen, and improve the standing of indigenous peoples, minority groups, and the larger society as well. He is an exemplary Native activist, indeed.” - David E. Wilkins
37. “NO MUSE IS GOOD MUSETo be an Artist you need talent, as well as a wifewho washes the socks and the children,and returns phone calls and library books and types.In other words, the reason there are so many moreMen Geniuses than Women Geniuses is not Genius.It is because Hemingway never joined the P.T.A.And Arthur Rubinstein ignored Halloween.Do you think Portnoy's creator sits through children's theatermatinees--on Saturdays?Or that Norman Mailer faced 'driver's ed' failure,chicken pox or chipped teeth?Fitzgerald's night was so tender because the fenderhis teen-ager dented happened when Papa was at a story conference.Since Picasso does the painting, Mrs. Picasso did the toilet training.And if Saul Bellow, National Book Award winner, invited thirty-threefor Thanksgiving Day dinner, I'll bet he had help.I'm sure Henry Moore was never a Cub Scout leader,and Leonard Bernstein never instructed a tricyclerOn becoming a bicycler just before he conducted.Tell me again my anatomy is not necessarily my destiny,tell me my hang-up is a personal and not a universal quandary,and I'll tell you no muse is a good museunless she also helps with the laundry.” - Rochelle Distelheim
38. “Music resembles poetry, in eachAre nameless graces which no methods teach,And which a master hand alone can reach.” - Alexander Pope
39. “You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.” - Ngaio Marsh
40. “...talent means nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything.” - Patrick Suskind
41. “The only thing--I tell you this straight from the heart--that disgusts me in Salzburg is that one can't have any proper social intercourse with those people--and that music does not have a better reputation...For I assure you, without travel, at least for people from the arts and sciences, one is a miserable creature!...A man of mediocre talents always remains mediocre, may he travel or not--but a man of superior talents, which I cannot deny myself to have without being blasphemous, becomes--bad, if he always stays in the same place. If the archbishop would trust me, I would soon make his music famous; that is surely true.” - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
42. “Fame is not so impossible for people with charisma, passion and talent. Being famous just means you have fans, and even one or two is enough to make you someone special. Ask a music fan who the best guitarist of all time is, and while one group insists that it was Jimmi Hendrix, another group swears that it was Eddie Van Halen instead. There will never be a time when everyone on this planet agrees on something like that, but luckily that's not important. All that matters is that both sides remain loyal, which they will assuming you continue to be who you are and do your thing. This is all that you need to be immortalized.” - Ashly Lorenzana
43. “When we dedicate our talent to serving a neighbor, it is possibly one of the highest forms of worship; something sacred transpires when we sacrifice our time and dedicate our God-given loves and talents to one another.” - Matt Litton
44. “Any fool can do something cool and look cool, but it takes skill to make something uncool cool again.” - Criss Jami
45. “Talent develops in tranquility, character in the full current of human life.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
46. “I wasn't good enough. I had a little talent but not enough. There is nothing more discouraging than having just a little talent.” - Rosamunde Pilcher
47. “...Come on let’s see the degree.” Katherine unrolled her scroll displaying a long declaration in Latin affixed with a red seal proclaiming her a Master of Art. “Imagine working for years to obtain a piece of paper we can hardly read ” Katherine joked. “And to officially declare you have talent ” Suzy returned.” - E.A. Bucchianeri
48. “Outcasts, callused from being in exile for too long, learn to thrive on being the hated; the attention and infamy of our actions fuel us to become antiheroes. Too often do we forget: we risk self-destruction if we fail to follow what we know is right; our talents too often become misplaced, misdirected, misguided from what could have been something wonderful.” - Mike Norton
49. “One of the talents of the [late] great Steve Jobs is that he [knew] how to design Medusa-like products. While every Macintosh model has had flaws (some more than others), most of them have has a sexiness and a design sensibility that has turned many consumers into instant converts. Macintosh owners upgrade far more often than most computer users for precisely this reason.” (p.98)” - Seth Godin
50. “Me plus you. (Imma tell you one time) Me plus you. (Imma tell you one time)Me plus you. (Imma tell you one time)One time. When I met ya girl my heart when knock (knock knock) Now them butterflies in my stomach won't stop (stop stop) Even love is a struggle and it's all we got. So we gun keep keep climbing to the mountain top. 'Cause your world, is my world, and my breath is your breath, and my heart is yours...” - Justin Bieber
51. “She sang, as requested. There was much about love in the ballad: faithful love that refused to abandon its object; love that disaster could not shake; love that, in calamity, waxed fonder, in poverty clung closer. The words were set to a fine old air -- in themselves they were simple and sweet: perhaps, when read, they wanted force; when well sung, they wanted nothing. Shirley sang them well: she breathed into the feeling, softness, she poured round the passion, force: her voice was fine that evening; its expression dramatic: she impressed all, and charmed one.On leaving the instrument, she went to the fire, and sat down on a seat -- semi-stool, semi-cushion: the ladies were round her -- none of them spoke. The Misses Sympson and the Misses Nunnely looked upon her, as quiet poultry might look on an egret, an ibis, or any other strange fowl. What made her sing so? They never sang so. Was it proper to sing with such expression, with such originality -- so unlike a school girl? Decidedly not: it was strange, it was unusual. What was strange must be wrong; what was unusual must be improper. Shirley was judged.” - Charlotte Brontë
52. “You can have tons of talent, but it won't necessarily keep you fed. If you have sharp instincts, through, you'll never go hungry.” - Haruki Murakami
53. “Tim and Raine are coming in.""Are they insane?""Apparently.” - Susan Bischoff
54. “How could I explain why I'd acted that way? How could I explain how scary it was, to find out that I needed her so much? Was I supposed to tell her how she'd changed everything? Like how U hadn't even realized how bad I felt until she'd made it better, just by looking at me. Like how I thought she was awesome, bad-ass ninja, and what I hated was the fact that I knew I couldn't protect her, when that's all I wanted to do. How could I explain, without sounding like a complete asshole, that I was so afraid of losing her I pushed her away? I couldn't.” - Susan Bischoff
55. “Bleeding from the ear. Oh Jesus, God. That was on the list for not applying pressure. But what did that mean? I couldn't remember. Couldn't think."Is he okay?""You dropped a two-hundred pound log on his head!" I screamed at Nathan. The air shuddered around us; the building itself seeming to tremble."I didn't mean-""Shut up, man," Marco said, swatting at Nathan's arm. "Joss, you need to calm the fuck down.""Calm down? Calm down?!" Energy pulsed around us, hot, thick, pricking at my eyes. Above, lights flickered, dimmed. A bulb shattered somewhere, and glass came tinkling down.” - Susan Bischoff
56. “What is most vile and despicable about money is that it even confers talent. And it will do so until the end of the world.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
57. “I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.” - Susanna Kaysen
58. “To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.” - William Shakespeare
59. “You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think--I did--that God put you on earth to blow your father away.” - Stephen King
60. “If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position hire the best writer. it doesn't matter if the person is marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever, their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing clear writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. great writers know how to communicate. they make things easy to understand. they can put themselves in someone else's shoes. they know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. Writing is making a comeback all over our society... Writing is today's currency for good ideas.” - Jason Fried
61. “If you ever find that you're the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.” - Austin Kleon
62. “I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.” - Natalie Goldberg
63. “What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted."Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable...""What was he like as a person?" asked Dalgliesh."Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity.""A typical writer, in fact?" suggested Dalgliesh mischievously.” - P.D. James
64. “Talent is the presence of ability and absence of understanding about the source and operation of knowledge.” - Idries Shah
65. “Some people today are wandering generalities instead of meaningful specifics because they have failed to discover and mine the wealth of potentials in them.” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
66. “I resented the idea of being talented. I couldn’t respect it — in my experience, no one else did. Being called talented at school had only made me a target for resentment. I wanted to work. Work, I could honor.” - Alexander Chee
67. “If you have money, power, and status today, it is due to the century and place in which you were born, to your talents and capacities and health, none of which you earned. In short, all your resources are in the end the gift of God.” - Timothy Keller
68. “Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliche, it's the key to victory over fear and it's cousin, depression.” - Robert McKee
69. “Talent is what God gives us, Skill is what we give back to Him” - Eliel-Pierre
70. “Over the last forty years, many educators, decision-makers, and even some parents have come to regard the arts as peripheral, and let’s face it, frivolous—especially the visual arts, with their connotation of ”the starving artist” and the mistaken concept of necessary talent” - Betty Edwards
71. “Desigur, viata [...] e, pentru un scriitor tanar, o prada care nu cedeaza daca nu stii de unde sa apuci.” - Marin Preda
72. “Bakat seakan menjadi tumbal, seolah dengan mudahnya menyalahkan Si Bakat terhadap hal-hal yang tidak mereka kuasai” - Wahyu Aditya
73. “The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted.” - Jonah Lehrer
74. “It's one thing if your hobby is to put ships inside a bottle, but a deer in the headlights!... That's a real talent” - Josh Stern
75. “If I had a talent I could claim, it would be as a finder of trouble. Which is undoubtedly what I'd find by sticking my nose where it had no right to be. But would I let a thought of trouble stop me? Not a snowflake's chance in hell.” - Keri Arthur
76. “It's ridiculous, how people judge talent. Or, rather, don't judge. They just default to what everyone else thinks.” - Siobhan Vivian
77. “Leaders are readers, disciples want to be taught and everyone has gifts within that need to be coached to excellence.” - Wayde Goodall
78. “Sometimes just looking into a person's eyes can tell a graphic story and a brilliant novel if you have the ability to turn it into words.” - L L Caulton
79. “Do you have the talent?' is rarely the question. 'Do you have the guts to finish?' is the real question.” - Orrin Woodward
80. “As I have said before, I had no illusions about my performing ability. But I did not know that my despair was brought about not because I had no talent but because I did not know how to develop it.” - Shinichi Suzuki
81. “i never begin my writings with talent. i begin them with strong emotions and liquor. they finish with talent.” - Darnell Lamont Walker
82. “Hard work is much more important than talent” - Carlo Rotella
83. “Everyone is alone. Everyone is empty. People no longer have need of others. You can always find a spare for any talent. Any relationship can be replaced. I had gotten bored of a world like that. But for some reason... The thought that someone other than you might kill me never occurred to me. (Makishima Shogo)” - Urobuchi Gen
84. “While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling for what was right. It was hard to explain how I knew what I knew.” - Ian McEwan
85. “A talent is no talent, unless it is used for the benefit of other people.” - Bryant McGill
86. “Talent never guarantees the success, its the art of success which can leads you to the sky” - Dr. Zeeshan Ahmed
