Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate.
Interpretation
Genius has great ideas, but only through hard work can those ideas be realized.
This quote emphasizes the importance of hard work in bringing ideas to fruition. While creativity and intelligence are valuable for generating insights and concepts, it is the dedication and effort put into implementing those ideas that ultimately leads to success and achievement.
In practice
In a motivational speech to students, one could use this quote to encourage them to value hard work in achieving their dreams.
Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.
Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.
Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.
Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.
Never read any book that is not a year old.
I think that if you live long enough, you realize that so much of what happens in life is out of your control, but how you respond to it is in your control. That's what I try to remember.
Meditation is not a matter of trying to achieve ecstasy, spiritual bliss, or tranquillity, nor is it attempting to become a better person. It is simply the creation of a space in which we are able to expose and undo our neurotic games, our self-deceptions, our hidden fears and hopes.
Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.
It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.
Over the years, I've evolved a somewhat heretical but time-and mind-saving approach to books, articles, editorials that deal with weighty matters. More often than not, by beginning at the end and contemplating the conclusions, one can determine if it's worth going through the whole to get there.
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