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Genius Quotes
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The present age delights in unearthing a great man's secrets; for one thing because we like to temper our admiration and also perhaps we have a vague hope of finding a clue to genius in such "revelations."
André Malraux
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The very greatest genius, after all, is not the greatest thing in the world, any more than the greatest city in the world is the country or the sky. It is the concentration of some of its greatest powers, but it is not the greatest diffusion of its might. It is not the habit of its success, the stability of its sereneness.
Leigh Hunt
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The appearance of a single great genius is more than equivalent to the birth of a hundred mediocrities.
Cesare Lombroso
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Adams could no more interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest Encke's comet. To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm. The quality of genius was an education almost ultimate, for one touched there the limits of the human mind on that side; but one could only receive; one had nothing to give — nothing even to offer.
Henry Adams
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The union of the Roman empire was dissolved; its genius was humbled in the dust; and armies of unknown barbarians, issuing from the frozen regions of the North, had established their victorious reign over the fairest provinces of Europe and Africa.
Edward Gibbon
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While legislation can stimulate and encourage, the real creative ability which builds up and develops the country, and in general makes human existence more tolerable and life more complete, has to be supplied by the genius of the people themselves. The Government can supply no substitute for enterprise.
Calvin Coolidge
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The inventor, the man with a unique, specialized talent, is the only real super-genius. But he is so rare that he needs no consideration.
Charles M. Schwab
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But then the general trouble with ignorance is always that the ignorant person has no idea that that's what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you're a genius.
Louis de Bernières
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To translate a great poem demands months and years of earnest devotion, coupled with poetic inspiration. But to read the book of Nature is the province and privilege of consummate genius, submissive to unremitting discipline.
Benjamin Peirce
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I know that back in the twenties everyone who saw it judged John Barrymore's Hamlet to be unforgettable. Great though it was, I found his Richard III even more impressive. Barrymore's sinister, half-mad hunchback became incandescent as he gleefully anticipated his conquest of the Lady Anne. The genius of the actor contrived a slight but inspired alteration of Shakespeare's: 'Was ever woman in this humour wooed? Was ever woman in this humour won?' The change to 'Never was woman in this manner wooed; never was woman in this manner won' heightened the deviltry in Richard's gloating.
Marc Connelly
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Under the stimulation of a "great age" or certain period of clarity in art a wider diffusion of genius becomes actual suggests to me that it is always potential.
Northrop Frye
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It is paltry philosophy if in the old-fashioned way one lays down rules and principles in total disregard of moral values. As soon as these appear one regards them as exceptions, which gives them a certain scientific status, and thus makes them into rules. Or again one may appeal to genius, which is above all rules; which amounts to admitting that rules are not only made for idiots, but are idiotic in themselves.
Carl von Clausewitz
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The elegant study... is consistent with the themes of modern cognitive neuroscience. Every aspect of thought and emotion is rooted in brain structure and function, including many psychological disorders and, presumably, genius. The study confirms that the brain is a modular system comprising multiple intelligences, mostly nonverbal.
Steven Pinker
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Persistence isn't very glamorous. If genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, then as a culture we tend to lionize the 1 percent. We love its flash and dazzle. But great power lies in the other 99 percent.
Susan Cain
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He had a startling genius, but somehow it did n't emerge;
Always on the evolution of things that would n't evolve;
Always verging toward some climax, but he never reached the verge;
Always nearing the solution of some theme he could not solve.
Sam Walter Foss
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I am no longer misled, therefore, by the mechanism of revolutions: it is as necessary to our species, as the waves to the stream, that it becomes not a stagnant pool. The genius of humanity blooms in continually renovated youth.
Johann Gottfried Herder
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The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an epoch.
Thomas Henry Huxley
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These examples, though as unfit for the imitation, as they are repugnant to the genius of America, are notwithstanding... very instructive proofs of the necessity of some institution that will blend stability with liberty.
James Madison
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One of the commonest mistakes and one of the costliest is thinking that success is due to some genius, some magic – something or other which we do not possess. Success is generally due to holding on, and failure to letting go.
Maltbie Davenport Babcock
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HYPOTHESES: Evil is boring. Cynicism is idiotic. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Receptivity is a superpower.
Rob Brezsny
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It is useless to deny that, unless one has a genius for imparting knowledge, teaching is a drudgery.
Margaret Deland
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Among the English authors, Shakespeare has incomparably excelled all others. That noble extravagance of fancy, which he had in so great perfection, thoroughly qualified him to touch the weak, superstitious part of his readers' imagination, and made him capable of succeeding where he had nothing to support him besides the strength of his own genius.
Joseph Addison
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My song can make you cry, take you by surprise. At the same time, can make your dry your eyes with the same rhyme. See what you're seeing is a genius at work, which to me isn't work, so it's easy to misinterpret it at first.
Eminem
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Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they're seeing now, what we'll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.
Jack Kerouac
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A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.
Steven Pressfield
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Yet would we die as some have done: Beating a way for the rising sun.
Arna Bontemps
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