Genius

"Many of these great natural geniuses, that were never disciplined and broken by rules of art, are to be found among the ancients, and in particular among those of the more Eastern parts of the world. Homer has innumerable flights that Virgil was not able to reach, and in the Old Testament we find several passages more elevated and sublime than any in Homer. At the same time that we allow a greater and more daring genius to the ancients, we must own that the greatest of them very much failed in, or, if you will, that they were much above the nicety and correctness of the moderns."

"Genius is patience."

"A genius is one who can do anything except make a living."

"Genius is but the free and harmonious play of all the faculties of a human being."

"We may say that there are two outstanding human types, one the saint and the other the genius. Religion has tended to recognise only the first of these and to look askance at the other. … If we accept genius as a form of God's self-expression equally with holiness, we must go on to question the assumption that humility is the basic virtue."

"Gott denkt in den Genies, träumt in den Dichtern und schläft in den übrigen Menschen."

"The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances."

"Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementia."

"Doing easily what others find it difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius."

"Men give way before the power of genius, they hate it and try to blow upon it because it takes without sharing the plunder, but they give way if it persists; in short, they worship it on their knees when they have failed in their efforts to bury it under the mud."

"As diamond cuts diamond, and one hone smooths a second, all the parts of intellect are whetstones to each other; and genius, which is but the result of their mutual sharpening, is character too."

"Le génie n’est que l’enfance retrouvée à volonté."

"The wild force of genius has oft been fated by nature to be finally overcome by quiet strength.… The volcano sends up its red bolt with terrific force, as if it would strike the stars; but the calm, resistless hand of gravitation seizes it, and brings it to the earth."

"Now, these men weren’t idiots. They were geniuses who paid a high price for their genius because the rest of their thinking was other-world. A genius is someone who travels to truth by an unexpected path. Unfortunately, unexpected paths lead to disaster in everyday life."

"There iz this difference between genius and common sense in a fox: Common sense iz governed bi circumstances, but circumstances iz governed by genius."

"Genius seems to be the fakulty ov doing a thing excellently well, that nobody supposed could be done at all."

"Genius after all ain't ennything more than elegant kommon sense."

"Tallent must hav memory, genius don't require it."

"Genius learns from nature; talent from books."

"Men of genius are scarce, but men of genius who use their genius for the benefit of the world are scarcer."

"The truth is, that necessity prompts invention, and genius is common to every age. The early poet, therefore, of superior powers, can operate on external nature, as well as on the polity and manners of his nation, with preeminent elegance and splendor. When the division of labor takes place, the modern poet, particularly in the comic walks of life, is capable of displaying a greater variety of character than the ancient. Hence Shakespeare and Congreve are infinitely superior to Plautus and Terence in rich variety of comic painting."

"—Did you never hear it said that what sets the genius apart from the plodder is the ability to see what happens and not what he expects to happen?"

"La génie n'est utre chose qu'une grande aptitude à la patience."

"Genius is bound to be indulgent. It should know human errors so well — has, with its large luminous forces, such errors itself when it deigns to be human, that, where others may scorn, genius should only pity."

"Talk not of genius baffled. Genius is master of man; Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can. Blot out my name, that the spirits of Shakespeare and Milton and Burns Look not down on the praises of fools with a pity my soul yet spurns."

"Humor is properly the exponent of low things; that which first renders them poetical to the mind. The man of Humor sees common life, even mean life, under the new light of sportfulness and love; whatever has existence has a charm for him. Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius. He who wants it, be his other gifts what they may, has only half a mind; an eye for what is above him, not for what is about him or below him."

""Genius" (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all)."

"Perfect works are rare, because they must be produced at the happy moment when taste and genius unite; and this rare conjuncture, like that of certain planets, appears to occur only after the revolution of several cycles, and only lasts for an instant."

"It is paltry philosophy if in the old-fashioned way one lays down rules and principles in total disregard of moral values. As soon as these appear one regards them as exceptions, which gives them a certain scientific status, and thus makes them into rules. Or again one may appeal to genius, which is above all rules; which amounts to admitting that rules are not only made for idiots, but are idiotic in themselves."

"The genius stands to the ordinary person as a Buddhist or Hindu jivanmukta (enlightened soul) stands to a jiva (mere soul). He is freed of animal desires, rather than chained to them. He is a passive observer who dwells in an eternal present, rather than an active participant in life driven by regrets about the past and hopes for the future."

"A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition."

"Watson and Crick were touted as the geniuses of molecular biology and lionized by the media. When a field is new, or newly fascinating in the public eye, a genius (or pair of geniuses) can become a lightning rod for the public's adulation; and molecular biology may never have another scientist who will attain the fame of Watson and Crick."

"Ever since the French revolution there has developed a vicious, cretinizing tendency to consider a genius (apart from his work) as a human being more or less the same in every sense as other ordinary mortals. This is wrong. And if this is wrong for me, the genius of the greatest spiritual order or our day, a true modern genius, it is even more wrong when applied to those who incarnated the almost divine genius of the Renaissance, such as Raphael."

"The daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, he ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from the rest of mankind."

"The man of génie is he whose ranging soul occupies itself with all that is in nature, receiving from her no idea that is not roused by his distinctive play of emotion. All is brought to life, turned to account; nothing is lost, nothing wasted.... He casts upon nature an eye gifted for the comprehension of abysses.... As for his constructs, they are too audacious for ordinary reason to inhabit.... In the arts as in the sciences … the genius seems to change the very nature of things; his character envelops whatever it touches; he casts into the future his piercing lights; he leaps ahead of his century, and it is powerless to follow him. He leaves behind those intellects which seek, even rightly, as may be, to criticize — poor lockstepped minds which leave nature as they found it. Behold him they may but are powerless to know him. For the genius alone may tell us truly who and what he is."

"Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius."

"Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius."

"Many men of genius must arise before a particular man of genius can appear."

"To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius — the men of reasoning and the men of imagination."

"Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius."

"Every work of Genius is tinctured by the feelings, and often originates in the events of times."

"But genius must be born, and never can be taught."

"The continuous capacity of genius to surpass understanding remains a human constant."

"Talent finds its models, methods, and ends, in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within."

"When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it."

"The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him."

"Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores."

"Vivitur ingenio, that damn'd motto there Seduced me first to be a wicked player."

"Genius is another word for magic, and the whole point of magic is that it is inexplicable."

"Among great geniuses those few draw the admiration of all the world upon them, and stand up as the prodigies of mankind, who, by the mere strength of natural parts, and without any assistance of art or learning, have produced works that were the delight of their own times and the wonder of posterity. There appears something nobly wild and extravagant in these great natural geniuses, that is infinitely more beautiful than all turn and polishing of what the French call a bel esprit, by which they would express a genius refined by conversation, reflection, and the reading of the most polite authors. The greatest genius which runs through the arts and sciences takes a kind of tincture from them and falls unavoidably into imitation."