#genius

But why would they do that? What is to be asked? He was a man who sees into things -- very ordinary things. A hat left on the floor of a café in Kingstown, a proverb overheard, an old fisherman mending a net: these, for him, were a kind of incitement. There are no answers other than that. He was not like the rest of us. Not even like himself. His imagination, or soul, or whatever province of his mind was hungry for the sustaining rain of the world, would soak in the storms of his own haunted strangeness, and the berries would bloom, and they were what they were, and if the tendrils were peculiar, and some of them wild, the fruits were so shockingly luscious and potent that the thirsty were willing to savour the bitter for the sake of the concomitant sweet. He needed the very ordinary. He was a beautiful man. What more than this need be said? The sort of man who makes you think the movement of foliage might be causing the breeze. ↗

— Joseph O'Connor

#beauty

How many stopped-up men and women does it take to produce one Einstein? Ten? A thousand? A hundred thousand? ... So this is what Einstein meant when he looked me in the eye that day and said, I would be nothing without you. It was not success he saw written in my face. He saw, rather, that I would never accomplish anything at all. ↗

— Rana Dasgupta

#failure #genius #ordinariness #success #men

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character had abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and courage which it contained. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#amount #been #character #contained #courage

Genius is of no country. ↗

— Charles Churchill

#genius #no country

To be complex does not mean to be fragmented. This is the paradox and the genius of our Canadian civilization. ↗

— Adrienne Clarkson

#civilization #complex #does #fragmented #genius

I think one of the geniuses of Bound and The Matrix and Memento is the complete collaboration of the effort. There were no rotten apples. ↗

— Joe Pantoliano

#bound #collaboration #complete #effort #geniuses

What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero. ↗

— Pablo Picasso

#become #begin #boy #child #childhood

Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius. ↗

— Albert Pike

#almost #artisans #artists #been #genius

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#brothers #clown #columbus #does #fact

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. ↗

— E. F. Schumacher

#any #bigger #complex #direction #fool