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Genius Quotes
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The first thing the world does to a genius is to make him lose all his youth.
Clarence Day
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Genius is lonely without the surrounding presence of a people to inspire it.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
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Millions of artist create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity.
In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally posterity include him in the primers of Art history.
I know that this statement will not meet with the approval of many artists who refuse this mediumistic role and insist on the validity of their awareness in the creative act.
Marcel Duchamp
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Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
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The scientific genius is so like the old Hebrew prophet. He singles out the essential from the mass of facts before him, and then - lifts up his eyes.
Margaret Todd (doctor)
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The universal social pressure upon women to be all alike, and do all the same things, and to be content with identical restrictions, has resulted not only in terrible suffering in the lives of exceptional women, but also in the loss of unmeasured feminine values in special gifts. The Drama of the Woman of Genius has too often been a tragedy of misshapen and perverted power.
Anna Garlin Spencer
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The greatest natural genius cannot subsist on its own stock: he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated. When we know the subject designed by such men, it will never be difficult to guess what kind of work is to be produced.
Joshua Reynolds
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Mister Speaker, I am not able to understand the mental organization of the man who can consider this bill, and the subject of which it treats, as free from very great difficulties. He must be a man of very moderate abilities, whose ignorance is bliss, or a man of transcendent genius, whom no difficulties can daunt and whose clear vision no cloud can obscure.
James A. Garfield
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Of course he [Dante] was a genius, wasn't he – like Shakespeare? … He and Dante seem to have known everything … known what would always be true … Wonderful, I imagine that we're going to find that this is full of quotations.
Ruth Draper
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Common sense is better than genius, and hence its bestowment is more universal.
Horace Mann
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We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other peoples' models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.
Shakti Gawain
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A field of clay touched by the genius of man becomes a castle.
Og Mandino
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Whores — Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
Julian Barnes
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Stand aside, and try not to catch fire if I shed sparks of genius.
Scott Lynch
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Good God! What a genius I had when I wrote that book [A Tale of a Tub].
Jonathan Swift
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Glory of earth, and light from heaven,
Young Genius ! but for thee,
And the wild wonders to thee given,
How base our earth would be !
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
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The aspiring author, whether genius or not, should never let a day pass without writing at least a few lines.
André Maurois
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Education is 'the guardian genius of our democracy.' Nothing really means more to our future, not our military defenses, not our missiles or our bombers, not our production economy, not even our democratic system of government. For all of these are worthless if we lack the brain power to support and sustain them.
Lyndon B. Johnson
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Yes, let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius.
Pietro Aretino
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So much fantasy relies on the author's having read Fraser's The Golden Bough or Robert Graves' The White Goddess and nothing else. The White Goddess is a crank book, a crank book of genius of course, but all the same... Mind you, I found Waking the Moon cited in an article in a pagan magazine as an authority for the idea that there was a patriarchal brotherhood, the Benandanti, that have been running things since antiquity, with no mention of the fact that it is a novel, and a fantasy at that. People want to believe something, and so they swallow anything.
Elizabeth Hand
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A profound common sense is the best genius for statesmanship.
James Russell Lowell
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When leadership rises to genius it has the power of transforming, of transforming experience into power. And that is what experience is for, to be made into power. The great leader creates as well as directs power.
Mary Parker Follett
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Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.
William Hazlitt
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I did not consider him to be any kind of a genius. I considered him deeply lacking in the area that mattered most in life. Star quality.
Augusten Burroughs
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From numberless books the fluttering reader, idle and inconstant, bears away the bloom that only clings to the outer leaf; but genius has its nectaries, delicate glands, and secrecies of sweetness, and upon these the thoughtful mind must settle in its labor, before the choice perfume of fancy and wisdom is drawn forth.
Robert Aris Willmott
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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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