Genius Quotes

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Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud, also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level — man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology.

Could we know by what strange circumstances a man's genius became prepared for practical success, we should discover that the most serviceable items in his education were never entered in the bills which his father paid for.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.

Louis Auchincloss

There is a thin line between genius and insanity.
I have erased this line.

I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.

Jeanette Winterson

There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably goes like this: Someone shrugs off the weight of his cultural traditions, ignores the baleful stares of authority, and does something his countrymen think to be completely batshit insane. Of those, Galileo was my personal favorite. Van Gogh comes in second, but he really was batshit insane.

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

A profound common sense is the best genius for statesmanship.

James Russell Lowell

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

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

This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

Poverty and Genius were coupled by the wisdom of Providence for wise and good ends, no doubt

Ignatius Sancho

Genius is lonely without the surrounding presence of a people to inspire it.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

The first thing the world does to a genius is to make him lose all his youth.

Strange mystery of our nature, that those in whom genius develops itself in imagination, thus taking its most ethereal form, should yet be the most dependent on the opinions of others!

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and immediately it becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and its halfway to being just like every other bloody book that's ever been written. But the best must never be allowed to drive out the good. In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship. One can at least try to write something that will arrest the readers' attention, that will encourage them, after reading the first paragraph, to take a look at the second, and then the third.

Man for all his genius is but an echo of the original Voice, a reflection of the uncreated Light.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

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

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.

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.

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

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

After upwards of two thousand years Epicurus has been exonerated from the reproach that the doctrines of his philosophy recommended the pleasures of sensuality and voluptuousness as the chief good. Calumny may rest on genius a considerable part of a world's duration; what then is the value of fame?

William Benton Clulow

The appearance of a single great genius is more than equivalent to the birth of a hundred mediocrities.

Cesare Lombroso