"Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. (...) Anyone who (...) does not partake of society is either a beast or a god."
Aristotle
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 A. Mozart
Two sorts of writers possess genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think.
R.W. Emerson
In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
R.W. Emerson
The reason we have so few geniuses is that people do not have faith in what they know to be true.
Kevin Solway
Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.
Owen Meredith Earl of Lytton
Genius learns from nature, its own nature. Talent learns from art.
Oscar Wilde
It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Gertrude Stein
Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are no female geniuses because there are no female Jack-the-Rippers.
Camille Paglia
It is easy to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Emerson
I call that mind free which protects itself against the usurpations of society, which does not cower to human opinion, which feels itself accountable to a higher tribunal than man's, which respects itself too much to be the slave of the many or the few.
Channing
Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.
Gibbon
The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive ... We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.
Thoreau
The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decisions, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.
Goethe
Genius does not herd with genius.
OW Holmes
This is the test and triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain it.
William Hazlitt
Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.
C. W. Ceran
Men of genius are the worst possible role models for men of talent.
Murray D. Edwards
A genius is one who shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it.
Author unknown
Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.
Joshua Reynolds
Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.
G. C. Lichtenberg
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
So few people think. When we find one who really does, we call him a genius.
Author Unknown
The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
George Steiner
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