~Tact.~--A tact which surpassed the tact of her sex as much as the tact of
her sex surpasses the tact of ours.--_Macaulay._
~Talent.~--It is adverse to talent to be consorted and trained up with
inferior minds or inferior companions, however high they may rank. The
foal of the racer neither finds out his speed, nor calls out his powers,
if pastured out with the common herd that are destined for the collar
and the yoke.--_Colton._
Whatever you are from nature, keep to it; never desert your own line of
talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed; be
anything else, and you will be ten thousand times worse than
nothing!--_Sydney Smith._
Gross and vulgar minds will always pay a higher respect to wealth than
to talent; for wealth, although it be a far less efficient source of
power than talent, happens to be far more intelligible.--_Colton._
As to great and commanding talents, they are the gift of Providence in
some way unknown to us. They rise where they are least expected. They
fail when everything seems disposed to produce them, or at least to call
them forth.--_Burke._
Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and
industry, and it is a voluntary power, while genius is
involuntary.--_Hazlitt._
Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being
the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.--_Coleridge._
It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort
of talent,--almost like a carrier-pigeon.--_George Eliot._
~Talking.~--I know a lady that loves talking so incessantly, she won't
give an echo fair play; she has that everlasting rotation of tongue,
that an echo must wait till she dies, before it can catch her last
words!--_Congreve._