"When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it! Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it-but all that had gone before."

Jacob Riis

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him."

Jonathan Swift