|
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, speech, Jan. 27, 1838
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
THOMAS EDISON, Life
The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.
Great intellects are skeptical.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, The Antichrist
The discovery of truth, by slow progressive meditation, is wisdom.--Intuition of truth, not preceded by perceptible meditation, is genius.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER, Aphorisms on Man
GENIUS, like a planet, takes a wide circuit through the pure expanse of nature, and visits not regions only, but whole worlds, which SENSE does not know to exist.
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Method of Nature
One might expect, perhaps, that a man full of genius could pasture in the greatness of his own thoughts, and renounce the cheap approbation of the crowd which he despises; yet he succumbs to the more powerful impulse of the herd instinct. His searching and his finding, his call, belong to the herd.
CARL JUNG, Psychology of the Unconscious
Genius is of no country.
CHARLES CHURCHILL, The Rosciad
Genius is the accumulated wealth of our humanity--its most intense development concentrated at one point, and then with clearer expression and with mysterious power shot back to us across the galvanic lines of thought and feeling.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
What the world needs is more geniuses with humility. There are so few of us left.
OSCAR LEVANT, The Educator's Book of Quotes
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius, the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The Conduct of Life
Almost everyone is born a genius and buried an idiot.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI, Notes of a Dirty Old Man
If you are a genius and unsuccessful, everybody treats you as if you were a genius, but when you come to be successful, when you commence to earn money, when you are really successful, then your family and everybody no longer treats you like a genius, they treat you like a man who has become successful.
PABLO PICASSO, quoted in Gertrude Stein's Picasso
Genius, when employed in works whose tendency it is to demoralize and to degrade us, should be contemplated with abhorrence rather than with admiration; such a monument of its power, may indeed be stamped with immortality, but like the Coliseum at Rome, we deplore its magnificence because we detest the purposes for which it was designed.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
Who in the same given time can produce more than many others, has vigour; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER, Aphorisms on Man
Genius holds its universal dominion because it touches the deepest suggestions and utters the multiform experiences of a common nature.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Genius is a steed too fiery for the plow or the cart.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Sometimes a single word, spoken by the voice of genius, goes far into the heart. A hint, a suggestion, an undefined delicacy of expression, teaches us more than we gather from volumes of less gifted men.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING, Thoughts
There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius.
ARTHUR HELPS, Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honoured so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
Genius always looks forward, and not only sees what is, but what necessarily will be.
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Crack-Up
There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not sooner or later responded.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, Rousseau and the Sentimentalists
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
Genius has oftenest been the pariah of his time, the unhoused god whom none cared for, unnamed till they whom he first promoted, enriched and honored, found it honorable to own their benefactor.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
Genius must be born, and never can be taught.
JOHN DRYDEN, Epistle to Congreve, 1693
The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.
MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
The men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, Rousseau and the Sentimentalists
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
MOZART
|
