quotations about genius
What the world needs is more geniuses with humility. There are so few of us left.
OSCAR LEVANT
The Educator's Book of Quotes
The truth is that, to every genius there is a characteristic weakness, a defect to which it naturally leans, and into which, in those inevitable moments when inspiration flags, it is apt to subside.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
GENIUS, like a planet, takes a wide circuit through the pure expanse of nature, and visits not regions only, but whole worlds, which SENSE does not know to exist.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims
Great intellects are skeptical.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The Antichrist
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Young Archimedes and Other Stories
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. In their similitudes and allusions, provided there was a likeness, they did not much trouble themselves about the decency of the comparison: thus Solomon resembles the nose of his beloved to the tower of Lebanon which looketh towards Damascus, as the coming of a thief in the night is a similitude of the same kind in the New Testament. It would be endless to make collections of this nature. Homer illustrates one of his heroes encompassed with the enemy, by an ass in a field of corn that has his sides belaboured by all the boys of the village without stirring a foot for it; and another of them tossing to and fro in his bed, and burning with resentment, to a piece of flesh broiled on the coals. This particular failure in the ancients opens a large field of raillery to the little wits, who can laugh at an indecency, but not relish the sublime in these sorts of writings. The present Emperor of Persia, conformable to this Eastern way of thinking, amidst a great many pompous titles, denominates himself "the sun of glory" and "the nutmeg of delight." In short, to cut off all cavilling against the ancients, and particularly those of the warmer climates, who had most heat and life in their imaginations, we are to consider that the rule of observing what the French call the bienseance in an allusion has been found out of later years, and in the colder regions of the world, where we could make some amends for our want of force and spirit by a scrupulous nicety and exactness in our compositions. Our countryman Shakespeare was a remarkable instance of this first kind of great geniuses.
JOSEPH ADDISON
"Genius", Essays and Tales
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
There is no off position on the genius switch.
DAVID LETTERMAN
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
Genius has oftenest been the pariah of his time, the unhoused god whom none cared for, unnamed till they whom he first promoted, enriched and honored, found it honorable to own their benefactor.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Genius makes its observations in short hand; talent writes them out at length.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Genius is talent set on fire by courage.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"Courage,", Counsels by the Way
The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein
There is nothing so certain as that those who are the most alert in discovering the faults of a work of genius, are the least touched with its beauties.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Genius, as we actually know it, is by no means hereditary. The great man is not necessarily the son of a great man or the father of a great man: often enough, he stands quite isolated, a solitary golden link in a chain of baser metal on either side of him. Mr. John Shakespeare woolstapler, of Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, was no doubt an eminently respectable person in his own trade, and he had sufficient intelligence to be mayor of his native town once upon a time: but, so far as is known, none of his literary remains are at all equal to Macbeth or Othello. Parson Newton, of the Parish of Woolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire, may have preached a great many very excellent and convincing discourses, but there is no evidence of any sort that he ever attempted to write the Principia. Per contra the Miss Miltons, good young ladies that they were (though of conflicting memory), do not appear to have differed conspicuously in ability from the other Priscillas and Patiences and Mercies amongst whom their lot was cast; while the Marlboroughs and the Wellingtons do not seem to bud out spontaneously into great commanders in the second generation. True, there are numerous cases such as that of the Herschels, father and son, or the two Scaligers, or the Caracci, or the Pitts, or the Scipios, and a dozen more, where the genius, once developed, has persisted for two or three, or even four lives: but these instances really cast no light at all upon our central problem, which is just this--How does the genius come in the first place to be developed at all from parents in whom individually no particular genius is ultimately to be seen?
GRANT ALLEN
"The Recipe for Genius", Falling in Love with Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
Genius is talent exercised with courage.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Culture and Value
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
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
Genius must be born, and never can be taught.
JOHN DRYDEN
Epistle to Congreve, 1693
Infinite numbers of intermixtures everywhere exist in civilised societies. Most of them are passable; many of them are execrable; a few of them are admirable; and here and there, one of them consists of that happy blending of individual characteristics which we all immediately recognise as genius--at least after somebody else has told us so.
GRANT ALLEN
"The Recipe for Genius", Falling in Love with Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius, the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life