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Quotation of the day
Thursday, 24 July 2008
Daily Quote:
"Success is full of promise till one gets it, and then it seems like a nest from which the bird has flown." (Beecher, Henry Ward - Success)

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Proverb of the Day
All that glitters is not gold.
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Browse Quotations about Genius

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.
A genius is one who can do anything except make a living.
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
Accept your genius and say what you think.
All of us, you, your children, your neighbors and their children are everyday geniuses, even though the fact is unnoticed and unremembered by everyone. That's probably because school hasn't encouraged us to notice what's hidden inside us waiting for the right environment to express itself.
All the means of action -- the shapeless masses -- the materials -- lie everywhere about us. What we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into the transparent crystal, bright and clear. That fire is genius.
As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius -- the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.
Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.
Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.
Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
Every man is a potential genius until he does something.
Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius.
Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.
Everybody denies I am a genius --but nobody ever called me one!
Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders.
Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.
Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.
Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius.
Genius always gives its best at first; prudence, at last.
Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.
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.
Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
Genius is childhood recaptured.
Genius is entitled to respect only when it promotes the peace and improves the happiness of mankind.
Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.
Genius is eternal patience.
Genius is independent of situation.
Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.
Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.
Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.
Genius is sorrow's child.
Genius is the ability to act rightly without precedent -- the power to do the right thing the first time.
Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.
Genius is the gold in the mine; talent is the miner who works and brings it out.
Genius is, to be sure, not a matter of arbitrariness, but rather of freedom, just as wit, love, and faith, which once shall become arts and disciplines. We should demand genius from everybody, without, however, expecting it.
Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.
Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.
Genius must be born, and never can be taught.
Genius sits in a glass house -- but in an unbreakable one --conceiving ideas. After giving birth, it falls into madness. Stretches out its hand through the window toward the first person happening by. The demon's claw rips, the iron fist grips. Before, you were a model, mocks the ironic voice between serrated teeth, for me, you are raw material to work on. I throw you against the glass wall, so that you remain stuck there, projected and stuck. (Then come the lovers of art and contemplate the bleeding work from outside. Then come the photographers. New art, it says in the newspaper the following day. The learned journals give it a name that ends in ism.)
Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.
Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
Genius without religion is only a lamp on the outer gate of a palace; it may serve to cast a gleam of light on those that are without, while the inhabitant sits in darkness.
Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
Genius, when young, is divine.
Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitual way.
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
Geniuses themselves don't talk about the gift of genius, they just talk about hard work and long hours.
Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.
Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.
Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.
Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What's a sundial in the shade.
His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.
I have nothing to declare except my genius.
I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
I really cannot know whether I am or am not the Genius you are pleased to call me, but I am very willing to put up with the mistake, if it be one. It is a title dearly enough bought by most men, to render it endurable, even when not quite clearly made out, which it never can be till the Posterity, whose decisions are merely dreams to ourselves, has sanctioned or denied it, while it can touch us no further.
I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
It is not because the touch of genius has roused genius to production, but because the admiration of genius has made talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant.
It is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.
It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.
It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women.
Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have is this. When I have a subject in mind. I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it... the effort which I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.
Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.
Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.
Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature.
Nothing is so envied as genius, nothing so hopeless of attainment by labor alone. Though labor always accompanies the greatest genius, without the intellectual gift labor alone will do little.
One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.
One of the satisfactions of a genius is his will-power and obstinacy.
Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.