#geniuses

Maugham's success, in fact, lies a good deal less in what he positively does than in what he discreetly leaves undone. He gets the colors of life into his Charles Strickland, not by playing a powerful beam of light upon him, but by leaving him a bit out of focus--by constantly insisting, in the midst of every discussion of him, upon his pervasive mystery--in brief, by craftily making him appear, not as a commonplace, simple and completely understandable man, but as the half comprehended enigma that every genuine man of genius seems to all of us when we meet him in real life. ↗

— H.L. Mencken

#geniuses #life

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water. ↗

— Mark Twain

#drinks #everybody #fortunately #geniuses #great

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered - either by themselves or by others. ↗

— Mark Twain

#either #geniuses #live #others #themselves

A few of the sublimest geniuses of Rome and Athens had some faint discoveries of the spiritual nature of the human soul, and formed some probable conjectures, that man was designed for a future state of existence. ↗

— David Brainerd

#conjectures #designed #discoveries #existence #faint

Genius is an overused word. The world has known only about a half dozen geniuses. I got only fairly near. ↗

— Fritz Kreisler

#dozen #fairly #genius #geniuses #got

Unfortunately, goodness and honor are rather the exception than the rule among exceptional men, not to speak of geniuses. ↗

— Cesare Lombroso

#exception #exceptional #geniuses #goodness #honor

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water. ↗

— Marilyn French

#drinks #everybody #geniuses #great #those

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#geniuses #ten #up

There's a stark difference between the words 'prodigy' and 'genius.' Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured out; geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered. Prodigies learn; geniuses do. ↗

— John Green

#intelligence #prodigies #intelligence

The purpose of having the orphans study all these diverse fields was not for them to just become geniuses, but to become polymaths – meaning they would be geniuses in a wide variety of fields. ↗

— James Morcan

#genius #genius-writers #geniuses #higher-intelligence #intelligence