Quotes About Genius

Not all crazy people are brilliant, but almost all brilliant people are crazy.

I sometimes think I should have titled this book 'Aristotle: The Genius Who Was Wrong About Fucking Everything'.

You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Brontë sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

She says, We're all some kind of genius. Just, she says, some of us in other ways.

Sometimes this genius goes dark and drowns in the bitter wells of his heart.

After the war, Lee described Traveller in a letter:Fine proportions, muscular figure, deep chest, short back, strong haunches, flat legs, small head, broad forehead, deliciate ears,quick eye, small feet and black mane and tail. Such a picture would inspire a poet, whose genius would then depict his worth and describe his endurance of toil,hunger,thirst,heat and cold, and the dangers and sufferings through which he passed.

In his perversity, or his genius, or both

induction motor, radio control, wireless communications, spark plugs. It was said that his ideas and inventions came to him fully formed in a flash of inspiration.

He learned from Novalis that every man is potentially hero and genius; that only inertia keeps men mediocre.

Someone was high or brilliant or both.

But it was only genius if you thought of it first. A teacher told him that. Genius is lonely.

I am blessed, personally, beyond measure, and yet oddly enough, I, too, struggle to feel His love for me every day. When I stack my obstacles against others' they seem to frivolous to be authentic. And yet, this mortal existence is designed by a genius, so that we all will, no matter our circumstances or parentage or gifts, have to exercise our agency to come to Him. And so though my problems may seem small to an outsider, they are big enough for me to desperately need Him.

Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.

Shakespeare} the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping

Shakespeare's state of mind

That wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry.

Genius needs freedom; it cannot flower if it is encumbered by fear, or rancor, or dependency, and without money freedom is impossible.

could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world. It

How he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in' was in ecstasy' in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings... and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

How he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had good nights and bad mornings... and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said.

The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility.

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.