Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.

Genius begins beautiful works, but only labor finishes them.

If the genius is an artist, then he accomplishes his work as art, but neither he nor his work of art has a telos outside him.

A work of genius is rough-hewn from the first, because it anticipates the lapse of time, and has an ingrained polish, which still appears when fragments are broken off, an essential quality of its substance.

...a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry.

The talent works, the genius creates.

As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.

The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it...but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity.

The solitary creator, dreaming his or her dream, unaided, seems to me to be the only artist we can trust.

It's only those exceptional and rare individuals who have brilliant ideas delivered to them by the muse, complete and gift wrapped. The rest of us have to work at it.

The artist after all is a solitary being.

The great genius does not let his work be determined by the concrete finite conditions that surround him, whilst it is from these that the work of the statesman takes its direction and its termination. … It is the genius in reality and not the other who is the creator of history, for it is only the genius who is outside and unconditioned by history.

"Gustavo Solivellas dice: "Los hombres geniales empiezan grandes obras, los hombres trabajadores las terminan" (Leonardo Da Vinci)"

Genius may stand on the shoulders of giants, but it stands alone.