GENIUS!

“Constant effort and frequent mistakes are the stepping stones of genius.”

― Elbert Hubbard

REAL Talent vs. Modesty...or does it?

You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.
 ~ Louisa May Alcott

Like her character, "Jo March" in Little Women, young Louisa was a tomboy.  "No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race," she claimed, "and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences ..."

For Louisa, writing was an early passion.  She had a rich imagination and often her stories became melodramas that she and her sisters would act out for friends.  Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays --"the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens."

At age 15, troubled by the poverty that plagued her family, she vowed:   "I will do something by and by.  Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!

*Excerpt taken from her complete biograghy here:  http://www.louisamayalcott.org/louisamaytext.html

Poet, Novelist, and Scientist

"Each indecision brings it's own delays 
and days are lost lamenting over lost days...
What you can do or think you can do, begin it. 
 For boldness has magic, power, and genius in it"

~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1749-1832, Poet, Novelist, and Scientist