quotations about genius
Men of genius supply the substance of history, while the mass of men are but the critical filter, the limiting, slackening, passive force needed for the modification of ideas supplied by genius.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
The discovery of truth, by slow progressive meditation, is wisdom.--Intuition of truth, not preceded by perceptible meditation, is genius.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Spanish Drama
True genius repeats itself forever, and never repeats itself--one ever varied sense beams novelty and unity on all.
JOHANN KASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
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.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Crack-Up
Who in the same given time can produce more than many others, has vigour; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
Sometimes a single word, spoken by the voice of genius, goes far into the heart. A hint, a suggestion, an undefined delicacy of expression, teaches us more than we gather from volumes of less gifted men.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light. Like those extraordinary stars of whose origins we are ignorant, and of whose fate, once they have vanished, we know even less, such men have neither forebears nor descendants: they are the whole of their race.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Personal Merit", Les Caractères
Genius must be born, and never can be taught.
JOHN DRYDEN
Epistle to Congreve, 1693
The true genius shudders at incompleteness -- imperfection -- and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
Marginalia
One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not sooner or later responded.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Rousseau and the Sentimentalists
Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Rousseau and the Sentimentalists
When I was about twelve, I used to think I must be a genius, but nobody's noticed. Either I'm a genius or I'm mad, which is it? "No," I said, "I can't be mad because nobody's put me away; therefore I'm a genius." Genius is a form of madness and we're all that way. But I used to be coy about it, like me guitar playing. But if there's such a thing as genius -- I am one. And if there isn't, I don't care.
JOHN LENNON
interview, Rolling Stone, December 1970
Genius: The capacity to see and to express what is simple, simply!
BRUCE LEE
Jeet Kune Do: Bruce Lee's Commentaries on the Martial Way
Genius speaks and acts for all men. In its triumphs all are interested. They enlarge our conceptions of the worth of humanity, and extend the limits of our capacities. In the grandeur and sweep of the poet's imagination, in the stern patience and searching analysis of the student of causes--compelling, as it were, reluctant Nature to a revelation of her secrets--we see ourselves, as in a magnifying mirror, enlarged and exalted.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
I could not but smile to think in what out-of-the-way corners genius produces her bantlings! And the Muses, those capricious dames, who, forsooth, so often refuse to visit palaces, and deny a single smile to votaries in splendid studies, and gilded drawing-rooms--what holes and burrows will they frequent to lavish their favors on some ragged disciple!
WASHINGTON IRVING
"The Club of Queer Fellows,", Tales of a Traveler
Let us start fair by frankly admitting that the genius, like the poet, is born and not made. If you wish to apply the recipe for producing him, it is unfortunately necessary to set out by selecting beforehand his grandfathers and grandmothers, to the third and fourth generation of those that precede him. Nevertheless, there is a recipe for the production of genius, and every actual concrete genius who ever yet adorned or disgraced this oblate spheroid of ours has been produced, I believe, in strict accordance with its unwritten rules and unknown regulations. In other words, geniuses don't crop up irregularly anywhere, 'quite promiscuous like'; they have their fixed laws and their adequate causes: they are the result and effect of certain fairly demonstrable concatenations of circumstance: they are, in short, a natural product, not a lusus naturæ. You get them only under sundry relatively definite and settled conditions; and though it isn't (unfortunately) quite true that the conditions will always infallibly bring forth the genius, it is quite true that the genius can never be brought forth at all without the conditions. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? No more can you get a poet from a family of stockbrokers who have intermarried with the daughters of an eminent alderman, or make a philosopher out of a country grocer's eldest son whose amiable mother had no soul above the half-pounds of tea and sugar.
GRANT ALLEN
"The Recipe for Genius", Falling in Love with Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science