quotations about genius
I could not but smile to think in what out-of-the-way corners genius produces her bantlings! And the Muses, those capricious dames, who, forsooth, so often refuse to visit palaces, and deny a single smile to votaries in splendid studies, and gilded drawing-rooms--what holes and burrows will they frequent to lavish their favors on some ragged disciple!
WASHINGTON IRVING
"The Club of Queer Fellows,", Tales of a Traveler
The true genius shudders at incompleteness -- imperfection -- and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
Marginalia
From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light. Like those extraordinary stars of whose origins we are ignorant, and of whose fate, once they have vanished, we know even less, such men have neither forebears nor descendants: they are the whole of their race.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Personal Merit", Les Caractères
It has been said that a man of genius should select his ancestors with great care--and yet there does not seem to be as much in heredity as most people think. The children of the great are often small.
ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL
Lectures and Essays
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: The capacity to see and to express what is simple, simply!
BRUCE LEE
Jeet Kune Do: Bruce Lee's Commentaries on the Martial Way
On the other hand, much of the commonplace, shallow fashionable talk about hereditary genius--I don't mean, of course, the talk of our Darwins and Galtons, but the cheap drawing-room philosophy of easy sciolists who can't understand them--is itself fully as absurd in its own way as the idea that something can come out of nothing. For it is no explanation of the existence of genius to say that it is hereditary. You only put the difficulty one place back. Granting that young Alastor Jones is a budding poet because his father, Percy Bysshe Jones, was a poet before him, why, pray, was Jones the elder a poet at all, to start with? This kind of explanation, in fact, explains nothing; it begins by positing the existence of one original genius, absolutely unaccounted for, and then proceeds blandly to point out that the other geniuses derive their characteristics from him, by virtue of descent, just as all the sons of a peer are born honourables. The elephant supports the earth, and the tortoise supports the elephant, but who, pray, supports the tortoise? If the first chicken came out of an egg, what was the origin of the hen that laid it?
GRANT ALLEN
"The Recipe for Genius", Falling in Love with Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
To be great is to be misunderstood.
OSCAR WILDE
letter to James McNeill Whistler, Feb. 23, 1885
These are the prerogatives of genius: To know without having learned; to draw just conclusions from unknown premises; to discern the soul of things.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
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
Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Idiot
Talk not of genius baffled. Genius is master of man.
Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
"Last Words", Poems of Owen Meredith
There have been only two geniuses in the world, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare. But, darling, I think you'd better put Shakespeare first.
TALLULAH BANKS
attributed, IMDb
Genius always looks forward, and not only sees what is, but what necessarily will be.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims
The ultimate recipe for genius, then, would appear to be somewhat after this fashion. Take a number of good, strong, powerful stocks, mentally or physically, endowed with something more than the average amount of energy and application. Let them be as varied as possible in characteristics; and, so far as convenient, try to include among them a considerable small-change of races, dispositions, professions, and temperaments. Mix, by marriage, to the proper consistency; educate the offspring, especially by circumstances and environment, as broadly, freely, and diversely as you can; let them all intermarry again with other similarly produced, but personally unlike, idiosyncrasies; and watch the result to find your genius in the fourth or fifth generation. If the experiment has been properly performed, and all the conditions have been decently favourable, you will get among the resultant five hundred persons a considerable sprinkling of average fools, a fair proportion of modest mediocrities, a small number of able people, and (in case you are exceptionally lucky and have shuffled your cards very carefully) perhaps among them all a single genius. But most probably the genius will have died young of scarlet fever, or missed fire through some tiny defect of internal brain structure. Nature herself is trying this experiment unaided every day all around us, and, though she makes a great many misses, occasionally she makes a stray hit and then we get a Shakespeare or a Grimaldi.
GRANT ALLEN
"The Recipe for Genius", Falling in Love with Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
The fact is, most of the grandiose talk about the vast gulf which separates genius from mere talent has been published and set abroad by those fortunate persons who fell, or fancied themselves to fall, under the former highly satisfactory and agreeable category. Genius, in short, real or self-suspected, has always been at great pains to glorify itself at the expense of poor, common-place, inferior talent. There is a certain type of great man in particular which is never tired of dilating upon the noble supremacy of its own greatness over the spurious imitation. It offers incense obliquely to itself in offering it generically to the class genius. It brings ghee to its own image. There are great men, for example, such as Lord Lytton, Disraeli, Victor Hugo, the Lion Comique, and Mr. Oscar Wilde, who pose perpetually as great men; they cry aloud to the poor silly public so far beneath them, 'I am a genius! Admire me! Worship me!' Against this Byronic self-elevation on an aërial pedestal, high above the heads of the blind and battling multitude, we poor common mortals, who are not unfortunately geniuses, are surely entitled to enter occasionally our humble protest. Our contention is that the genius only differs from the man of ability as the man of ability differs from the intelligent man, and the intelligent man from the worthy person of sound common sense. The sliding scale of brains has infinite gradations; and the gradations merge insensibly into one another. There is no gulf, no gap, no sudden jump of nature; here as elsewhere, throughout the whole range of her manifold productions, our common mother saltum non facit.
GRANT ALLEN
"The Recipe for Genius", Falling in Love with Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
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
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
The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
B. F. SKINNER
Walden Two