Quotes About Genius

Properly, eccentricity is not so much a component of genius, as it is a consequence of the habits of men of genius. The reputation for genius is usually acquired by severe and protracted intellectual labor. This occasions repeated reactions from an extreme tension to an extreme relaxation of spirits--the transitions expressing themselves in sharp and abrupt impulses.

It requires a great genius to flatter successfully a great personage. The common arts of adulation are thrown away upon the exalted. They are so accustomed to these that they take little notice.

Genius makes its observations in short hand; talent writes them out at length.

Genius speaks and acts for all men. In its triumphs all are interested. They enlarge our conceptions of the worth of humanity, and extend the limits of our capacities. In the grandeur and sweep of the poet's imagination, in the stern patience and searching analysis of the student of causes--compelling, as it were, reluctant Nature to a revelation of her secrets--we see ourselves, as in a magnifying mirror, enlarged and exalted.

Windsor Horne Lockwood III was born to great wealth. He did not pretend otherwise. He did not like multibillionaires who bragged about their business acumen when they'd started out with Daddy's billions. Genius is almost irrelevant in the pursuit of enormous riches anyway. In fact, it can be a hindrance. If you are smart enough to see the risks, you might try to avoid them. That type of thinking—safe thinking—never led to great wealth. Win

Genius is a curse. That's how I look at it. Some think that the brilliant comprehend the universe in a way the rest of us can't. They see the world how it truly is—and that reality is so horrible they lose their minds. Clarity leads to insanity.

Drew Van Dyne gave him the cocky grin. Van Dyne was probably thirty-five, ten years younger than Davis. He'd come in as a music teacher eight years ago. He looked the part, the former rock 'n' roller who woulda-shoulda made it to the top except the stupid record companies could never understand his true genius. So now he gave guitar lessons and worked in a music store where he scoffed at your pedestrian taste in CDs. Recent

José] Saramago for the last 25 years stood his own with any novelist of the Western world [..] He was the equal of Philip Roth, Gunther Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile — he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy. It is hard to believe he will not survive.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

A play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be attained only when the protagonist can separate his genius for expanding consciousness from his own passion for theatricality.

Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion.

M.: Do you think Mahler thought he was doing something avant-garde? O.: I don't think so. M.: Schoenberg and Alban Berg were certainly conscious of being avant-garde, though. O.: Oh, very much so. They had their "method". Mahler had no such thing. M.: So he flirted with chaos, not as a methodology, but naturally and instinctively. Is that what you are saying? O.: Yes. Isn't that exactly where his genius lies?

The world would be a real mess if everybody was a genius. Somebody's got to keep watch, take care of business.

A world full of geniuses would have significant problems.

Genius doesn't specialize; genius is reason in itself.

I really don't think I have that much of the gift; I have a little bit, but I wish I were Schubert or Chopin or Beethoven, though Beethoven had a very difficult time writing melody, too.

A modern-day Dickens with a popular voice and a genius for storytelling in any genre, Stephen King has written many wonderful books.

He is not in the least arrogant. The last album was written in a room in Sussex. He was like a mad professor, spending all day writing and then coming out with brilliant tunes.

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.

Well, the very best operas are the ones written by the very best composers.

A lot of people don't know that Beethoven, when he wrote the Fifth Symphony, that second movement, he took eight years to figure that out!

Mozart wrote so many works in his thirty-five years that it would take a lifetime just to write out the notes. We literally do not know how he did it.

Despite his dodgy politics, Yeats remains an inspiration for his genius and the simple fact that the older he got, the better he wrote.

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.