Quotes About Genius

Poetry requires a manner of viewing things which is not that of the average man, but is individual to the poet; it requires, in a word, genius. One could hardly expect Milton to point this out; having genius himself he would assume that everyone else had genius; he would assume that we all had the power of looking at the world not only frankly but freshly because he would not understand any other way of looking at it.

'Twas in this lovely garden first I saw your loveliness displayed; You sat; my heart was high, and durst Sit by you wondering, undismay'd; You rose: my heart fell on its face And knew the Genius of the place.

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

Genius is seldom recognized for what it is: a great capacity for hard work.

Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.

Whatever question there may be of his [Thoreau's] talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one, but it was eminently personal. He was unperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial—he was parochial.

The genius of this system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its provisions were procedural, not substantive.

Genius is talent set on fire by courage.

All the means of action - the shapeless masses - the materials - lie everywhere about us. What we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into the transparent crystal, bright and clear. That fire is genius.

Men of genius are often dull and inert in society, as a blazing meteor when it descends to earth, is only a stone.

Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.

A man of genius truly matched in the companionship of mated love was the brightest being of creation, his genius was held in balance. Alone, he overworks, his mind runs upon its own circles, its own horrific convolutions

What a strange power there is in woman! She comes in contact with a genius without portfolio, an exceptionally useless implement like me, and then, without any preaching on her part, he feels himself in duty bound to do all sorts of things he never dreamed of doing before. The

Hamlet is the human soul as it was, as it is, and as it will be. In conceiving this drama, Shakspeare overstepped the limit fixed even for genius. I can understand Homer and Dante, studied by the light of their epoch. I can comprehend that they could do what they did; but how an Englishman of the seventeenth century could foreknow psychosis, a science of recent growth, will be to me, in spite of my study of Hamlet, an everlasting mystery. Having

Chance created the situation; genius made use of it.

Napoleon, the man of genius, did this! But to say that he destroyed his army because he wished to, or because he was very stupid, would be as unjust as to say that he had brought his troops to Moscow because he wished to and because he was very clever and a genius

Chance created the situation; genius utilized it," says history. But what is chance? What is genius? The words chance and genius do not denote any really existing thing and therefore cannot be defined. Those words only denote a certain stage of understanding of phenomena.

Only by renouncing our claim to discern a purpose immediately intelligible to us, and admitting the ultimate purpose to be beyond our ken, may we discern the sequence of experiences in the lives of historic characters, and perceive the cause of the effect they produce (incommensurable with ordinary human capabilities) and then the words chance and genius become superfluous.

Chance created the position; genius took advantage of it," says history.

One of the cheapest commodities in the world is unfulfilled genius. All of us want to be known as a unique individual, the one who broke out of the pack. So, you offer yourself up as a sacrifice and what you're afraid of is losing and being thrown back into the pack. One question taunts you. Do you want to have, or do you want to be?

We all understand that genius doesn't guarantee success, but it's seductive to assume that success must come from genius.

Dick Feynman was a genius of visualization (he was also no slouch with equations): he made a mental picture of anything he was working on. While others were writing blackboard-filling formulas to express the laws of elementary particles, he would just draw a picture and figure out the answer.

Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people.