quotations about genius
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Young Archimedes and Other Stories
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
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
What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook E", Aphorisms
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
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
One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Genius is talent exercised with courage.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Culture and Value
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
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
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
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
I don't want to be a genius--I have enough problems just trying to be a man.
ALBERT CAMUS
Notebooks
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
Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
B. F. SKINNER
Walden Two
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
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
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