Genius Quotes

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so thatwithout the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

~ Pearl S. Buck

Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to be the same thing. They both have a tendency to blur the lines of what we call norms, or established reality. They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures.-- from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius

~ Aberjhani

It's a silly argument, and unnecessary. Creativity doesn't happen in here or out there but in the spaces in between. Creativity is a relationship, one that unfolds at the intersection of person and place.

~ Eric Weiner

Einstein's secretary once said that if Einstein were born among the polar bears, he would still be Einstein. But unless polar bears were well versed in theoretical physics, that is not true. Einstein would not be Einstein. Which is not to take anything away from Einstein, or the polar bears, but simply to point out that he was part of a creative ecology, and trying to isolate him from it is not only silly but futile.

~ Eric Weiner

Genius creates from the heart and when the artifact is broken so is the heart.

~ Elizabeth Goudge

Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains.

~ Henri Bergson

The genius inside a person wants activity. It’s connected to the stars, it’s connected to a spark and it wants to burn and it wants to make and it wants to create and it has gifts to give. That is the nature of inner genius.

~ Michael Meade

A genius masters the art of observation, and unites with the source of imagination to create advancements in the cause for human evolution.

~ T.f. Hodge

How many geniuses die undiscovered, not only by others but, more sadly, by themselves?

~ Joyce Wycoff

Rather than being medicalized or romanticized, mental disorders, or mental dis-eases, should be understood as nothing less or more than what they are, an expression of our deepest human nature. By recognizing their traits in ourselves and reflecting upon them, we may be able both to contain them and to put them to good use. This is, no doubt, the highest form of genius.

~ Neel Burton

At first the creative mind submits to its entry into the symbolic register and gets itself structured like everyone else. Then he balks at a fateful moment which becomes a turning point in the history of his mental growth. From the entry into the imaginary order where he acknowledges his ego and then to the symbolic order where he recognizes his place in the society and finally in his de-symbolization or a refusal to obey the Law that is the rules of the world of symbols, a creative genius is born.

~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

Pseudo-artists think that being an artist means opposing whatever seems to be an establishment. That is not creative at all. True creativity is the ability to gain perspective wherever you may have missed it before.

~ Criss Jami

Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them.

~ William Shakespeare

Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, it was not even ahead of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one.

~ Lester Bangs

Creativity is not intelligence, it is the ability to do what you did not know through the use of what you know.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, [Trout Mask Replica] was not even ahead of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one.

~ Lester Bangs

I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary office job was a betrayal of that life, and I had to pursue that life at all costs. Management consulting, law school, med school, those were fine for other people — I didn’t judge! — but I was an artist. I was super special. I was sparkly. I would walk another path.And I would walk it alone. That was another thing I knew about being an artist: You didn’t need other people. Other people were a distraction. My little chrysalis of genius was going to seat one and one only.

~ Lev Grossman

I have never seen genius without a touch of madness... and vice versa.

~ Lance Conrad

It is in everyone's interest that every person's creative genius be encouraged and allowed to develop and express.

~ Efiong Etuk

The genius craves inspiration: she craves altered states and fresh perceptions. She will have them either through evolving closer to the divine or through devolving lower into the world. This is how some people with great genius come to die of drug and alcohol addiction: they seek inspiration by intoxication and are thereby ruined.

~ Carolyn Elliott

The twin aspects of genius, the passive and the active, are possessed by the fully realized artist; they also form the necessary equipment of the Adept. Yet in very few people are these twin aspects manifested. Nearly everyone has a capacity for the passive aspect, which involves some sort of appreciation of aesthetic values. There are few people totally unresponsive to the beauties of nature, and none at all that is not responsive to its ferocious manifestations.Fewer are able to respond profoundly to the beauty of natural phenomena, and fewer still to so-called works of art. It takes a degree of genius to respond to such manifestations the whole time. Artists in this category are among the saints, some of whom thrilled with rapture at the constant awareness of the total unity, harmony, and beauty of things.Such were Boehme, Ramakrishna, etc. Some yogis are immersed in an unsullied and vibrant bliss derived from the incessant contemplation of this 'world-bewitching maya'4-the breath-taking wonder of the great and glamorous illusion which surrounds us.On the other side of the fence, on the side of active or creative genius, there are yet fewer. Active or creative genius means nothing less than the ability to translate the wonder or the terror of the great lfla (the great play of life) in terms of visual, tactile, audible, olfactory, or some other sensual presentation of phenomena.But there is a third aspect of genius which is yet more rare. It is the ability to open the door of the theatre and admit the influences from outside, from the swarming gulfs beyond the grasp of the mind, and accessible only to the magical entity whose fantastic feelers can snare the most fugitive impulses as they flash through the holes in space, the kinks in time, to be reflected in the magic mirror of the artist's mind.

~ Kenneth Grant

The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore the giant agony of the world and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity.

~ Helen Waddell

I place my fingers upon these keys typing 2,000 dreams per minute and naked of spirit dance forth my cosmic vortex upon this crucifix called language.

~ Aberjhani

Eons ago, the creative genius of God foresaw that it would take the shattered pieces of my ‘yesterday’ to construct the sturdy portal to my ‘tomorrow.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Each age selects its own geniuses from the past to suit its own needs. It's always been that way.

~ Seb Kirby

This reasoning is based on the wishful thinking that genius can only be earned through education and hard work. It denies the time-proven truth that genius can strike like a random bolt of lightning, at any time in any place, even in a humble glover's home in a small town in Elizabethan England.

~ Andrea Mays

Real geniuses would like that what we think of ourselves is true.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.

~ Virginia Woolf

If you know that I am genius Then know that you made me genius Everyone don't accept me as genius Because they aren't genius to belief me as genius

~ Hasil Paudyal

It's too short,' she said, 'ever so much too short.' Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.

~ Virginia Woolf

Robin Williams is one more example, that genius people are genius for a reason, and that reason is feeling without reasoning. Depression is for sensitive people. Sensitive people sense the world as it is, and they can't cope with it. Sensitive people need a better, more tender world to live in. Matter of fact, we all do.

~ Aleksandra Ninkovic

The dull pray, the geniuses are light mockers.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I beg you, help me, in angelic charity,Pray my efforts will reflect your mastery!

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

An exceedingly confident student would in theory make a terrible student. Why would he take school seriously when he feels that he can outwit his teachers?

~ Criss Jami

There's a difference between thinking you can't be wrong and having no regrets. Wrongness is what occurs prior to empiricism, in hindsight a counterpart of revelation, and revelation is nothing to regret.

~ Criss Jami

When we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wagner or an Edison or other extraordinary person, we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it is the atmosphere in which the talent was cradled that explains; it is the training it received while it grew, the nurture it got from reading, study, example, the encouragement it gathered from self-recognition and recognition from the outside at each stage of its development: when we know all these details, then we know why the man was ready when his opportunity came.

~ Mark Twain

Interestingly, bonobo percussionists prefer a tempo of 280 beats per minute, the syllabic rate at which most humans speak.

~ Dr Susan Block

A few lessons learned as a teacher: I've learned that if you whisper, children will listen...a scribble can be anything (I mean anything!) a monster, a cat, a mom, a dad--our job is to ask to find out and pay attention--usually the most challenging student needs the most challenges to keep them learning and engaged---most of all we must care and the rest handles itself. xo

~ Jill Telford

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. In the morning, — solitude; said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson