Life & Wisdom Quote by Kate Chopin

Chopin’s line lands like a rebuke to the comforting myth that art is simply hard work plus hustle. She insists on “absolute gifts” - talents that aren’t earned, curated, or networked into existence - and in doing so she pokes at a particularly American faith in self-making. It’s an unsentimental claim from a writer who watched respectability politics police women’s ambition and whose own career revealed how little grit can do against gatekeepers, scandal, and taste.

The phrase “includes much” signals that she’s not romanticizing inspiration; she’s widening the job description. Art, for Chopin, isn’t a mood. It’s a total condition that demands aptitude, perception, discipline, and a temperament sturdy enough to survive being misunderstood. Her emphasis on unacquired gifts can sound elitist, but the subtext feels more diagnostic than snobbish: some people have the raw sensorium for art, and pretending otherwise turns “artist” into a lifestyle label.

Then she pivots: talent is not the hinge; courage is. “The courageous soul” reads like a coded autobiography. Chopin wrote about female desire, marriage as suffocation, and social hypocrisy with a frankness that invited backlash (The Awakening’s reception was brutal). Courage here isn’t bravado; it’s the willingness to risk exile - to publish what the room doesn’t want to hear, to keep going when praise is withdrawn, to choose clarity over approval. In her world, especially for a woman, success required not just gifts, but the nerve to pay the price of using them.