talent

If the power to do hard work is not talent, it is the best substitute for it.

It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.

Remember the parable of talents-the story of the three servants who had received talents, five, two and one respectively? When their master returned they all gave account of their stewardship. The first two had doubled their capital. Each of them said so in sixteen words and their work was pronounced, "Well done, good and faithful servant." The third servant had accomplished absolutely nothing but his report took forty-three words, three times as long as each of the other two reports. Don't be like servant number three. Make good! Don't explain your failure! Do the thing you are expected to do! Then you won't have to explain why you didn't, couldn't, wouldn't, or shouldn't. Efficiency! That is the soul-satisfying joy of making good. Doing your work just a little better than anyone else gives you the margin of success. Making good required no explanation. Failure required forty-three words.

As all his friends will bear witness, he was a man with an outstanding gift for pastime with good company, for laughter and the love of friends - a gift which found full scope in any number of holidays and walking tours, the joyous character of his response to these being well conveyed in his letters. He had, indeed, a remarkable talent for friendship, particularly for friendship of an uproarious kind, and argumentative but never quarrelsome.

The chief end of man, as I see it, is to find security, have liberty to express his abilities, enjoy the love of family and friends, and to secure recognition of his talents, to worship God in his own way, and to participate in a government that will protect him in his exercise of these liberties, and by education and training in the development of the arts and sciences, and the techniques of their application, help him to find his proper place in the scheme of things.

A good character is, in all cases, the fruit of personal exertion. It is not inherited from parents; it is not created by external advantages; it is no necessary appendage of birth, wealth, talents, or station; but it is the result of one's own endeavors-the fruit and reward of good principles manifested in a course of virtuous and honorable action.

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

Talent is only a starting point in business. You've got to keep working that talent. Someday I'll reach for it and it won't be there.