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Those who dance are thought mad by those who do not hear the music.
-Anon.
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Genius is sorrow's child.
-John Adams
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It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women.
-Louisa May Alcott
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Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
-Henri Frederic Amiel
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To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.
-Henri Frederic Amiel
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The function of genius is to furnish cretins with ideas twenty years later.
-Louis Aragon
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We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.
-Louis Aragon
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There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.
-Aristotle
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There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
-Antonin Artaud
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There are big men, men of intellect, intellectual men, men of talent and men of action; but the great man is difficult to find, and it needs --apart from discernment --a certain greatness to find him.
-Margot Asquith
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Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
-W. H. Auden
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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.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Genius is childhood recaptured.
-Jean Baudrillard
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One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.
-Simone de Beauvoir
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Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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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.
-Max Beerbohm
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Genius is the gold in the mine; talent is the miner who works and brings it out.
-Marguerite Blessington
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Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.
-Christian Nevell Bovee
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What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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Since when was genius found respectable?
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.
-Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon
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The man who succeeds above his fellows is the one who early in life, clearly discerns his object, and towards that object habitually directs his powers. Even genius itself is but fine observation strengthened by fixity of purpose. Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius.
-Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
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Every one is a genius, more or less. No one is so physically sound that no part of him will be even a little unsound, and no one is so diseased but that some part of him will be healthy -- so no man is so mentally and morally sound, but that he will be in part both mad and wicked; and no man is so mad and wicked but he will be sensible and honourable in part. In like manner there is no genius who is not also a fool, and no fool who is not also a genius.
-Samuel Butler, Erewhon
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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.
-Samuel Butler
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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.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
-Italo Calvino
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Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.
-C. W. Ceran
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Passion holds up the bottom of the universe and genius paints up its roof.
-Chao Chang
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The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.
-Lydia Maria Child
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Genius is independent of situation.
-Charles Churchill
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True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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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.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.
-Charles Caleb Colton
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When human power becomes so great and original that we can account for it only as a kind of divine imagination, we call it genius.
-William Crashaw
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Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
-Edward Dahlberg
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He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.
-Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
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Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.
-Robertson Davies
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Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.
-Leonardo DaVinci
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What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea -- possessing them -- that what has been said has still not been said enough.
-Eugene Delacroix
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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.
-Denis Diderot
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Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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Genius, when young, is divine.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius.
-Isaac Disraeli
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Genius must be born, and never can be taught.
-John Dryden
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Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.
-John Dryden
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Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought, but genius must be born; and never can be taught.
-John Dryden
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Einstein said that genius begins where rules end. He did however help invent nuclear weapons inadvertently and we've plunged toward a new world order since then as a result. One world or none - it seems the path cannot change. I'd go with Robert Frost on taking the path not traveled.
-James Dye
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Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
-Thomas Alva Edison
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His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.
-Thomas Alva Edison
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Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.
-George Eliot
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You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.
-George Eliot
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A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man's crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The greatest genius is the most indebted person.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men -- that is genius.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders.
-Desiderius Erasmus
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Genius is entitled to respect only when it promotes the peace and improves the happiness of mankind.
-Lord Essex
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Genius is another word for magic, and the whole point of magic is that it is inexplicable.
-Margot Fonteyn, The Magic of Dance Like It Is
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Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
-Benjamin Franklin
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Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What's a sundial in the shade.
-Benjamin Franklin
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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.
-Margaret Fuller
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I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.
-Richard Buckminster Fuller
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The first and last thing required of genius is, love of the truth.
-Johann von Goethe
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The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources.
-Johann von Goethe
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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.
-Alexander Hamilton
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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.
-B. R. Hayden
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The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously; and those who have produced immortal works, have done so without knowing how or why. The greatest power operates unseen.
-William Hazlitt
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Talent is a faculty that is highly developed, but genius commands all the faculties.
-Francis Herbert Hedge
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Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.
-Heinrich Heine
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Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature.
-Josiah Gilbert Holland
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The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass spoil a draught of fair water.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Genius is the ability to act rightly without precedent -- the power to do the right thing the first time.
-Elbert Hubbard
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Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
-Victor Hugo
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The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
-Victor Hugo
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The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds.
-David Hume
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We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
-Aldous Huxley
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Rising genius always shoots out its rays from among the clouds, but these will gradually roll away and disappear as it ascends to its steady luster.
-Washington Irving
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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitual way.
-William James
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Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police.
-James Joyce
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Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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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.
-Peter Kline
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The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
-Arthur Koestler
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To see things in the seed is genius.
-Lao-Tzu
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Who in the same given time can produce more than others has vigor; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius.
-Johann Kaspar Lavater
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Genius always gives its best at first; prudence, at last.
-Johann Kaspar Lavater
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The real people of genius were resolute workers not idle dreamers.
-George Henry Lewes
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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.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Towering genius disdains a beaten path.
-Abraham Lincoln
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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.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.
-James Russell Lowell
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Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.
-Robert S. Lund
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Genius is eternal patience.
-Michelangelo Buonarroti
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There is no genius in life like the genius of energy and industry.
-Don G. Mitchell
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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.
-Hannah More
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Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
-Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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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.
-Jos
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Geniuses themselves don't talk about the gift of genius, they just talk about hard work and long hours.
-J. C. (James Cash) Penney
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The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
-Pablo Picasso
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It is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.
-Pablo Picasso
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A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
-Ezra Pound
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One of the satisfactions of a genius is his will-power and obstinacy.
-Man Ray
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The lamp of genius burns quicker than the lamp of life.
-Friedrich von Schiller
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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.
-Friedrich Von Schlegel
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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.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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A man of talent will strive for money and reputation; but the spring that moves genius to the production of its works is not as easy to name
http://www.paulstiles.org/Design/On%20Genius.htm
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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Genius is an intellect that has become unfaithful to its destiny.
-Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
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Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.
-Germaine De Stael
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It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
-Gertrude Stein
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When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
-Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects
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True genius sees with the eyes of a child and thinks with the brain of a genius.
-Puzant Kevork Thomajan
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Every man is a potential genius until he does something.
-Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree
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The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.
-H. R. Trevor-Roper
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Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered -- either by themselves or by others.
-Mark Twain
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So few people think. When we find one who really does, we call him a genius
-Source Unknown
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There is one subtle but important difference between genius and stupidity and that is that genius has its limits. You'll see yourself clearest in the eyes of your friends.
-Source Unknown
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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.
-Source Unknown
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Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.
-Source Unknown
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The divine egoism hat is genius.
-Mary Webb
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Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.
-Simone Weil
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Everybody denies I am a genius --but nobody ever called me one!
-Orson Welles
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I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
-Oscar Wilde
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Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.
-Oscar Wilde
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I have nothing to declare except my genius.
-Oscar Wilde
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The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
-Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891
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Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.
-Bern Williams
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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.
-Virginia Woolf
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Books about Genius
