Genius Quotes - Page 25

• The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Communication, Thoughtful, Silence

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• It has been said that genius is only the power of making continuous effort. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it. We are told that there is no failure, except in no longer trying - no defeat, except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own weakness of purpose.

  Kate Smith

  Effort, Trying, Lines

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• I have often noticed that the need for cash and the production of a masterpiece just don't coincide with me. Money will hit me at a big off-period and genius will hit me in starvation, that is, I often get the money when I don't think I deserve it and have been lolling around for days and days thinking the most abysmal thoughts.

  Bessie Head

  Thinking, Needs, Cash

  Bessie Head, Randolph Vigne (1991). “A gesture of belonging: letters from Bessie Head, 1965-1979”, Heinemann

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• By cultivating an interest in a few good books which contain the result of the toil or the quintessence of the genius of some of the most gifted thinkers of the world, we need not live on the marsh and in the mists. The slopes and ridges invite us.

  Thomas Starr King

  Book, Toil, Needs

  Thomas Starr King (1880). “Christianity and Humanity ...: Ed., with a Memoir”

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• Genius, apart from natural sensitiveness, is prone equally to unreasoning joy and to bitterest morbidness.

  Mary MacLane

  Joy, Natural

  Mary MacLane (2014). “I Await the Devil's Coming: The Story of Mary MacLane”, p.63, The Floating Press

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• Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be. We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy? Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.

  Albert Einstein

  Art, Crazy, Moving

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• The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Doe, World, Arms

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• Genius and taste don't go together.

  Helmut Newton

  Together, Taste

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• James Watt was equally distinguished as a natural philosopher and chemist; his inventions demonstrate his profound knowledge of those sciences, and that peculiar characteristic of genius - the union of them for practical application.

  Humphry Davy

  Profound, Peculiar, Unions

  Sir Humphry Davy (2001). “The Collected Works of Sir Humphrey Davy: Discourses delivered before the Royal Society. Elements of agricultural chemistry, pt. I”

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• When I was younger I would have told you it was my genius, but now I don't believe that for a second. Music just comes out of you, it flows through, it's weird. If you think about it intellectually, how does someone come up with two hundred riffs over their life time?

  Tracii Guns

  Believe, Thinking, Two

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• Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Light, Darkness, Temples

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.405, Penguin

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• Genius is a stream bathed by the folly.

  Emile Augier

  Streams, Folly

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• Consolation for those moments when you can't tell whether you're the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

  Virginia Woolf

  World, Fool, Moments

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• The geniuses have created, but they were less: the saints have been, but they created little...A twofold tragedy of creativeness reveals the truth that there has not yet been in our world a religious epoch of creativity.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Religious, Creativity, Our World

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• The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Imagination, Academic, Intellect

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). “The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms”, p.77, Random House

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• That which we call character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Character, Mean, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.134, Graphic Arts Books

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• A formal and orderly conception of the whole is rarely present, perhaps even rarely possible, except to a few men of exceptional genius.

  Chester Barnard

  Men, Vision, Formal

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• Adversity is wont to reveal genius, prosperity to hide it.

  Horace

  Inspirational, Adversity, Prosperity

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• A genius is always on duty; even his dreams are tax deductible.

  Edward Abbey

  Dream, Duty, Taxes

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.30, RosettaBooks

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• Commerce changes entirely the fate and genius of nations, by communicating arts and opinions, circulating money, and introducing the materials of luxury; she first opens and polishes the mind, then corrupts and enervates both that and the body.

  Thomas Gray

  Fate, Commerce, Nations

  "The Works of Thomas Gray: Containing His Poems and Correspondence, with Memoirs of His Life and Writings".

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• A host is like a general: calamities often reveal his genius.

  Horace

  Host, Calamity

  "Satires". Book by Horace, Book II, satire viii, lines 73 - 74, c. 35 BC, 30 BC.

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• Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Heart, Men, Hands

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.118, Penguin

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• The voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Daughter, Art, Mean

  Friedrich Schiller (2015). “The Works of Frederick Schiller: Top Classic of German”, p.3324, 谷月社

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• Genius is the ability to see the self-evident where the rest of the world turns blind.

  Kedar Joshi

  Self, World, Blind

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• Genius is answerable only to itself; it is the sole judge of the means, since it alone knows the end; thus genius must consider itself as above the law, for it is the task of genius to remake the law; moreover the man who frees himself from his time and place may take everything, hazard everything, for everything is his by right.

  Honore de Balzac

  Mean, Men, Law

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