The literary gift is a mere ...

The literary gift is a mere accident - is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.
The literary gift is a mere accident - is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.
 Max Beerbohm

More phrases

Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.
 William Tecumseh Sherman
The same mentality that leads to environmental despoliation, environmental destruction, also leads to damage to people.
 Naomi Oreskes
You can't break poor people mentality. Once you grow up poor, you don't take anything for granted. It can have the negative side also because you can never truly be relaxed.
 Will Smith
The man with the average mentality, but with control, with a definite goal, and a clear conception of how it can be gained, and above all, with the power of application and labor, wins in the end.
 William Howard Taft
I think society had to grow up to the mentality of Peter Norman.
 John Carlos

Quotes from the same author

Men prominent in life are mostly hard to converse with. They lack small-talk, and at the same time one doesn't like to confront them with their own great themes.
 Max Beerbohm
There is laughter that goes so far as to lose all touch with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in itself. This is laughter at its best. A man to whom such laughter has often been granted may happen to die in a work-house. No matter. I will not admit that he has failed in life. Another man, who has never laughed thus, may be buried in Westminster Abbey, leaving more than a million pounds overhead. What then? I regard him as a failure.
 Max Beerbohm
Few, as I have said, are the humorists who can induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to give us the joy of being worn down and tired out with laughter, is a success to be won by no man save in virtue of a rare staying-power. Laughter becomes extreme only if it be consecutive. There must be no pauses for recovery. Touch-and-go humour, however happy, is not enough. The jester must be able to grapple his theme and hang on to it, twisting it this way and that, and making it yield magically all manner of strange and precious things.
 Max Beerbohm
No Roman ever was able to say, 'I dined last night with the Borgias'.
 Max Beerbohm
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.
 Max Beerbohm