Quotes on Genius

This homage has been rendered not to me - for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me - but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius.

Man's real genius and knowledge remains preserved in books

Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel—everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.

Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

Remember, if you do the things you ought to do when you ought to do them, then someday you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them…Whatever you do or dream you can do—begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.

The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity.

Where Chanel came from in France is anyone’s guess. She said one thing one day and another thing the next. She was a peasant—and a genius. Peasants and geniuses are the only people who count and she was both.

Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

Any complex activity, if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament. If they are outstanding and reveal themselves in exceptional achievements, their possessor is called a 'genius'.

Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

Genius is not a single power, but a combination of great powers. It reasons, but it is not reasoning; it judges, but it is not judgment; imagines, but it is not imagination; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not passion. It is neither, because it is all.

She was an absolute genius as a comedic actress, with an extraordinary sense for comedic dialogue. It was a God-given gift. Believe me, in the last fifteen years there were ten projects that came to me, and I'd start working on them and I'd think, 'It's not going to work, it needs Marilyn Monroe.' Nobody else is in that orbit; everyone else is earthbound by comparison.

The constructive intellect [genius] produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers.

The greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they work less.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

When thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion of genius; lift up thy head!

It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power to an inborn talent. In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome. The artist begins with a vision — a creative operation requiring an effort. Creativity takes courage.