Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Talent hits a target that no one else can hit,” wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “Genius hits a target no one else can see.

"Said in reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein: "Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target others cannot even see.

Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.

Talent perceives differences; genius, unity

Genius is talent exercised with courage.

Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work...

Talent is the ability to let ideas manifest themselves through you.

Genius is the ability to see things invisible, to manipulate things intangible, to paint things that have no features.

"Genius is the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our willing, and our aims, and consequently to discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject, the clear eye of the world; and this not merely for moments, but with the necessary continuity and conscious thought to enable us to repeat by deliberate art what has been apprehended and "what in wavering apparition gleams fix in its place with thoughts that stand for ever!

But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.

Genius, as we tend to talk about it today, is some sort of mysterious and combustible substance that burns brightly and burns out. It's the strange gift of poets and pop stars that allows them to produce one wonderful work in their early twenties and then nothing. It is mysterious. It is there. It is gone.

Well, for starters, the obvious: we all seem to agree genius begins with feats of mental greatness. The thinking needs to be novel, so the results need to be beyond what most can envision. As it takes courage to push past the confines of culture, the thinking must also be brave. Because an athlete’s canvas is nothing more than his body moving through space and time, then an act of genius must also be defined as an act of redefinition–redefining what is possible for the human body.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.