Quotes About Genius

Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

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

They call me mad. All artists are mad.

Lawrence's genius is exploiting the space between fact-based truth and news-based reality, and he created successful campaigns for contenders in local races before advancing to state and national elections.

So while it was clear that Raymond had a vision, Jeffery still had a hard time working out precisely what vision that might be. Is he a genius or a complete idiot? And, for that matter, what would you call Jeffery for thinking all of this?

People fail for the most part because they shoot themselves in the foot. If you go for a long time without shooting yourself in the foot, other people start calling you a genius.

It turns out that our intuition is a greater genius than we are.

When you are operating under the influence of an inner vow, you are unteachable and unapproachable. You think you are the genius in a world of stooges.

What allows genius to flower is not neurosis but its opposite... ordinary Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment.

Machado de Assis is a kind of miracle, another demonstration of the autonomy of literary genius in regard to time and place, politics and religion.

I prefer my first word, 'formidable.' But this was softened by joviality in youth and kindliness in maturity. Genius is formidable and so is goodness; he had both. It is useful in a picture sometimes to introduce a balancing figure to give scale, and I would choose the figure of W. H. Auden as one of comparable impressiveness and goodness, felt as formidable and friendly.

He's got a great but unorganized mind

unpacked her books, her sweet delight in happier days, and her soothing resource in the hours of moderate sorrow: but there were hours when even these failed of their effect; when the genius, the taste, the enthusiasm of the sublimest writers were felt no longer.

The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement in a manner that would be amusingly absurd were it not so monstrously unjust and socially harmful.

We are often hurt by a brutality and sluggish conceptions of the vulgar; not considering that some there must be, to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and that cultivated genius, or even any great refinement and delicacy in their moral feelings, would be a real misfortune to them.

God gives talent. Work transforms talent into genius.

No one can arrive from being talented alone, work transforms talent into genius.

No one can arrive from being talented alone. God gives talent, work transforms talent into genius.

the drunken poet (a genuis by daylight)

Pour comprendre le génie de Proust, il faut avoir vécu cela, Albertine disparue. Je revis vraiment La prisonnière et Albertine disparue (La fugitive, comme titre, me plaît moins).

I'm like a mad professor, but without the spiky hair.

The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a grip on our eyeballs and eardrums, which in turn can be marketed to advertisers.

Schubert had arguably the same melodic gift as Mozart, but even less support. He didn't have the early exposure, never got to travel anywhere, and yet generated and amassed a body of work that grew and developed and is very profound.