Quotes About Genius

I claim I could write were I not ashamed. There's something fundamentally cheap about such awareness of genius. Only a madman would read a novel with deference. In that case it had best be done in formal clothes, like going to a funeral. So long as it does not seem as affected as a good work!

clime, to talk about the Bible. To Clemens's inquiry "What, in your opinion, is the Bible?" my father, with his effortless genius, summarized his feelings about it in a single phrase: "The Bible is a book of allegories made to instruct man in the higher principles that should guide life." "And would you consider it a true

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Beauty is a form of genius--is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.

There is nothing thrilling about a laboring person's work, but it is the laboring person who makes the ideas of the genius possible. And it is the laboring saint who makes the ideas of his Master possible. When you labor at prayer, from God's perspective there are always results. What an astonishment it will be to see, once the veil is finally lifted, all the souls that have been reaped by you, simply because you have been in the habit of taking your orders from Jesus Christ.

Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. The genius is a man who knows everything without having learned it.

Talent is hereditary; it may be the common possession of a whole family (eg, the Bach family); genius is not transmitted; it is never diffused, but is strictly individual.

The great genius does not let his work be determined by the concrete finite conditions that surround him, whilst it is from these that the work of the statesman takes its direction and its termination. … It is the genius in reality and not the other who is the creator of history, for it is only the genius who is outside and unconditioned by history.

Woman, in short, has an unconscious life, man a conscious life, and the genius the most conscious life.

Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. … The theory of special genius, according to which for instance, it is supposed that a musical genius should be a fool at other subjects, confuses genius with talent. … There are many kinds of talent, but only one kind of genius, and that is able to choose any kind of talent and master it.

The great man of science, unless he is also a philosopher, … deserves the title of genius as little as the man of action.

If it really were the case, as popular opinion has tried to establish, that the genius were separated from ordinary men by a thick wall through which no sound could penetrate, then all understanding of the efforts of genius would be denied to ordinary men, and their works would fail to make any impression on them. All hopes of progress depend on this being untrue. And it is untrue. The difference between men of genius and the others is quantitative not qualitative, of degree not of kind.

It is certainly true that most men need some kind of a God. A few, and they are the men of genius, do not bow to an alien law. The rest try to justify their doings and misdoings, their thinking and existence (at least the menial side of it), to some one else, whether it be the personal God of the Jews, or a beloved, respected, and revered human being. It is only in this way that they can bring their lives under the social law.

Genius is oftentimes but a poor fool, who clinging to a thing that belongs to no age, Truth, does oftentimes live on a pittance and die in a hospital: but whosoever has the gift to measure aright their generation is invincible —living, they shall enjoy all the vices undetected; and dead, on their tombstones they shall possess all the virtues.

Do you imagine that a corrupt age cannot revere, that an artificial age cannot be stirred by truth, that an abject age cannot rise to comprehension under the compelling force of genius ?—you are wrong to doubt. Was it not the vilest of the Pagan ages that gave credence, and foothold, and tenure, to the faiths and the philosophies of Paul 1

Envy depreciates the genius of the great Homer.

Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed.

A genius! For 37 years I've practised fourteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius!

What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.

Godel continued drawing conclusions beyond the point where Einstein stopped.

Only a hopeless madman - or a chess genius - could live in such chaos.

It will work. I am a marketing genius.

Recognizing the artist Joseph Cornell's genius for recycling, he inscribed a book to him as the Benvenuto Cellini of Flotsam and Jetsam