#genius

His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine. ↗

— Thomas A. Edison

#content #define #genius #his #inspiration

Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright. ↗

— Van Wyck Brooks

#clothed #found #genius #gray #more

Genius, throughout history, has been found difficult to classify because it varies in amount: It's rare to find a genius in the context of the noun, but most people, if not all, have a bit of genius in them in the context of the adjective. ↗

— Criss Jami

#amount #classification #classify #context #creativity

If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not - and the odds are against it - go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper - write. ↗

— J. B. Priestley

#challenge #desk #face #genius #go

We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in color and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types. ↗

— Joseph Priestley

#administrative #color #course #fire #fit

Only a genius can play a fool. ↗

— Michael Rapaport

#genius #only #play

Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius. ↗

— Joshua Reynolds

#genius #longer #rules #taste #teach

Holly frowned at her. "Glad to see you've forgiven yourself so quickly." "Harboring feelings of guilt can have a negative affect on mental health." "Child geniuses," growled Holly. "Genii," said Minerva. ↗

— Eoin Colfer

#minerva-paradizo #genius

A genius is someone who takes a complex thing and makes it look simple. An academic does the opposite. ↗

— Robert Fanney

#genius #thought #genius

But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#genius #intellect #proust #seed #social