#genius

If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice. ↗

— John Steinbeck Journal of a Novel - The East of Eden Letters

#courage

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 that without 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

#genius #poem-in-your-pocket-day #death

It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes,” [T.S. Eliot] wrote, “who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent. ↗

— Ross Wetzsteon

#genius #talent #tseliot #writing #dreams

Equality has no place for genius. ↗

— Allen Bloom

#genius #liberalism #equality

A man's genius seems to befriend the more when he reads with open heart, the masterpiece of masterminds, the sagacity of sages, and the ingenious words of geniuses of ages. ↗

— Ogwo David Emenike

#inspirational #sagacity #age

In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission. ↗

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#genius #novelty #poetry #truth #truths

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed. ↗

— Allen Ginsberg

#bed #best #brought #certain #experience

If you wish success in life, make perseverance you bosom friend, experience your wise councellor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius. ↗

— Joseph Addison

#hope #success #experience

Wisdom is nothing more than confirmed imagination: just because one did not study for his exam does not mean that he should leave it blank. ↗

— Criss Jami

#confidence #confirmation #confirmed #creativity #error

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line. ↗

— Oscar Levant

#erased #fine #fine line #genius #i