GENIUS QUOTES III

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

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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

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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

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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

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On the other hand, much of the commonplace, shallow fashionable talk about hereditary genius--I don't mean, of course, the talk of our Darwins and Galtons, but the cheap drawing-room philosophy of easy sciolists who can't understand them--is itself fully as absurd in its own way as the idea that something can come out of nothing. For it is no explanation of the existence of genius to say that it is hereditary. You only put the difficulty one place back. Granting that young Alastor Jones is a budding poet because his father, Percy Bysshe Jones, was a poet before him, why, pray, was Jones the elder a poet at all, to start with? This kind of explanation, in fact, explains nothing; it begins by positing the existence of one original genius, absolutely unaccounted for, and then proceeds blandly to point out that the other geniuses derive their characteristics from him, by virtue of descent, just as all the sons of a peer are born honourables. The elephant supports the earth, and the tortoise supports the elephant, but who, pray, supports the tortoise? If the first chicken came out of an egg, what was the origin of the hen that laid it?

GRANT ALLEN

"The Recipe for Genius", Falling in Love with Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science


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

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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

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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

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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

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Genius must be born, and never can be taught.

JOHN DRYDEN

Epistle to Congreve, 1693

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

HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL

Journal Intime

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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

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One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire.

ELIZA COOK

Diamond Dust

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It is odd to consider what great geniuses are sometimes thrown away upon trifles.

JOSEPH ADDISON

"Genius", Essays and Tales

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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.

JOSEPH ADDISON

"Genius", Essays and Tales

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Genius, when employed in works whose tendency it is to demoralize and to degrade us, should be contemplated with abhorrence rather than with admiration; such a monument of its power, may indeed be stamped with immortality, but like the Coliseum at Rome, we deplore its magnificence because we detest the purposes for which it was designed.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon

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