Great Throughts Treasury

"To make the common marvelous is the test of genius." - James Russell Lowell

"Men seldom die of hard work; activity is God's medicine. The highest genius is willingness and ability to do hard work. Any other conception of genius makes it a doubtful, if not a dangerous possession." - Robert S. MacArthur

"Describes the professional artist as a morally suspect, even socially dangerous, conman, who from a deliberately chosen position of spiritual alienation, yet offers the ambiguous, self-serving products of his art, in expectation not only of support and remuneration, but also of social approval and even adoration as genius. [Paraphrased]" - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Genius is eternal patience." -

"The light of genius is sometimes so resplendent as to make a man walk through life, amid glory and acclamation; but it burns very dimly and low when carried into “the valley of the shadow of death.” But faith is like the evening star, shining into our souls the more brightly, the deeper is the night of death in which they sink." - William Mountford

"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius." -

"Genius... in the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and where the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art." -

"The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett

"If there be anything that can be called genius, it consists chiefly in ability to give that attention to a subject which keeps it steadily in the mind, till we have surveyed it accurately on all sides." - Paul Reichmann

"You must have no dependence on your own genius. If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency... Assiduity... will produce effects similar to those which some call the result of natural powers." - Joshua Reynolds, fully Sir Joshua Reynolds

"Let us accept different forms of religion among men, as we accept different languages, wherein there is still but one human nature expressed. Every genius has most power in his own language, and every heart in its own religion." -

"To give great attention to details is one mark of the genius - to putter with trifles is not." - Charles B. Rogers

"The death of censure is the death of genius." - William Gilmore Simms

"Hunger is the handmaiden of genius." -

"Every enthusiast contains a false enthusiast, every lover a false lover, every man of genius a false man of genius, and, as a rule, every fault its counterfeit: this is necessary in order to assure the continuity of one's personality, not only in the eyes of others but in one's own - in order to understand oneself, count upon oneself, think of oneself; in order, in short, to be oneself." - Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry

"Knowledge is no proof of genius." -

"Originality is the supreme evidence of genius." -

"Talent repeats; genius creates." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation." -

"I've put my genius into my life; I've only put my talent into my works." -

"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius." -

"Activity back of a very small idea will produce more than inactivity and the planning of genius." -

"Love designs, thought sketches, action sculptures the works of spirit. Love is divine, conceiving, creating, completing, all things. Love is the Genius of Spirit." -

"Doing easily what others find is difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius." - Henri Frédéric Amiel

"We are material in the hands of the Genius of the universe for a still larger destiny that we cannot see in the everlasting rhythm of worlds." - John Elof Boodin

"Since when was genius found respectable?" - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"All the great – the permanently great – things that have been achieved in the world have been so achieved by individuals, working from the instinct of genius or goodness." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The test of organization is not genius. It is the capacity to make common people achieve uncommon performance." - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker

"Genius without Education is like Silver in the Mine." - Benjamin Franklin

"Talent is a very common family trait; genius belongs rather to the individuals – just as you find one giant or one dwarf in a family, but rarely a whole brood of either. Talent is often to be envied, and genius very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of dying in a hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody’s vested ideas." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"Silence is all the genius a fool has." - Zora Neale Hurston

"Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way." - William James

"Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored… It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction." - Abraham Lincoln

"In this world no one rules by love; if you are but amiable, you are no hero; to be powerful, you must be strong, and to have dominion you must have a genius for organizing." - John Henry Newman, aka Cardinal Newman and Blessed John Henry Newman

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"The most important results in daily life are to be obtained, not through the exercise of extraordinary powers, such as genius and intellect, but through the energetic use of simple means and ordinary qualities, with which nearly all human individuals have been more or less endowed." - Samuel Smiles

"The only difference between men of great achievement and those who remain in mediocrity is that the great pay little attention to what has been done and what obstacles or apparent reasons may stand in the way of achievement but devote themselves to contemplating what can or ought to be done. Those who allow their mental and emotional natures to recoil, refusing to let this sense reach out into the undiscovered, destroy their own capabilities and this keeps them always in the prison house of limitation. But it should be noted that prison is only the recoil or reflex of their own nature. Genius is that which goes on through conditions and circumstances and keeps eternally in the process of expansion and extension of achieving power." - Baird T. Spalding

"“To believe your own thought,” observed Emerson, “to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius.” But to impose what you believe is true for you upon all men, indeed upon a single individual – that is despotism." -

"Talent repeats; Genius creates. Talent is a cistern; Genius, a fountain… Talent accumulates knowledge, and has it packed up in the memory; Genius assimilates it with its own substance, grows with every new accession, and converts knowledge into power. Talent gives out what it has taken in; Genius, what has risen from its unsounded wells of living thought." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius." -

"Talent does what it can; genius does what it must." -

"Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move in the opposite direction." - Albert Einstein

"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children." -

"Every child is a genius, but is enslaved by the misconceptions of self-doubt of the adult world, and spends much of his or her time having to unlearn that perspective." -

"Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it." -

"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." -

"The finest gift you can give anyone is encouragement. Yet, almost no one gets the encouragement they need to grow to their full potential. If everyone received the encouragement they need to grow, the genius in most everyone would blossom and the world would produce abundance beyond the wildest dreams." - Sidney Madwed

"Every positive value has its price in negative terms; the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima." -

"Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities." -