Don't neglect the gifts in you. Power reserved is function suspended. The day you choose to switch on your passion is the day you will see your dunamis power in you. Be inspired!

The most successful people start with dominant talent—and then add skills, knowledge, and practice to the mix. When they do this, the raw talent actually serves as a multiplier.

The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands.

When it comes to competing with the best and brightest in whatever your talents or educational skills are, you have to have the confidence within yourself that you are able to achieve.

Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

Talents are seeds of greatness. With big dreams well dispensed in form of achievements, you can pick money from people’s pockets and they will never get the guts to call you a thief.

What's more, we had discovered that people have several times more potential for growth, when they invest energy in developing their strenghts instead of correcting their deficiencies.

I know how you feel. But people can't surpass their true design. Our talents, our gifts. All programmed into us from the start. I know this because since birth... I was made to destroy.

Greatness is finding your natural talent, fueling it with passion, planting it in well-nourished soil, and toiling in the garden until it breaks through the earth and reaches for the stars.

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]

Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can play the 'Gloria'?

To his surprise he...discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something…that you cared about a great deal.

Emotion is always multiplied in the art of a person who doesn't really show much emotion. It once expanded deep within his hidden soul, and following the downplay his audience is blown away.

Good fortune and talent are both ingredients of success, but like any recipe, they can be substituted with clever alternatives. The one irreplaceable ingredient I've found, however, is work.