This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was a first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Every soul is potentially Genius, if not arrested." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The secret of genius is… first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The secret of genius is...first, last, midst, and without end to honor every truth by use." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men; that is genius." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"In the republic of mediocrity genius is dangerous." - Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
"There is the same difference between talent and genius that there is between a stone mason and a sculptor." - Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
"The highest endowments do not create - they only discover. All transcendent genius has the power to make us know this as utter truth. Shakespeare, Bethoveen - it is inconceivable that they have fashioned the works of their lives; they only saw and heard the universe that is opaque and dumb to us." - Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
"One is not born a genius; one becomes a genius." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
"The most common-place people become highly imaginative when they are in a passion. Whole dramas of insult, injury and wrong pass before their minds, efforts of creative genius, for there is sometimes not a fact to go upon." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
"Our minds are so constructed that we can keep the attention fixed on a particular object until we have, as it were, looked all around it; and the mind that possesses this faculty in the highest degree of perfection will take cognizance of relations of which another mind has no perception. It is this, much more than any difference in the abstract power of reasoning, which constitutes the vast difference between the minds of different individuals. This is the history alike of the poetic genius and of the genius of discovery in science. “I keep the subject,” said Sir Isaac Newton, “constantly before me, and wait until the dawnings open by little and little into a full light.” It was thus that after long meditation he was led to the invention of fluxions, and to the anticipation of the modern discovery of the combustibility of the diamond. It was thus that Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, and that those views were suggested by Davy which laid the foundation of that grand series of experimental researches which terminated in the decomposition of the earths and alkalies." - Benjamin Collins Brodie, fully Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet
"It is attention, more than any difference between minds and men.—In this is the source of poetic genius, and of the genius of discovery in science.—It was this that led Newton to the invention of fluxions, and the discovery of gravitation, and Harvey to find out the circulation of the blood, and Davy to those views which laid the foundation of modern chemistry." - Benjamin Collins Brodie, fully Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet
"Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use." - William Hazlitt
"To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim, requires a genius, a vital appropriating exercise of mind closely allied to that which first created it." - William Rounseville Alger
"The greatness of a popular character is less according to the ratio of his genius than the sympathy he shows with the prejudices and even the absurdities of his time. Fanatics do not select the cleverest, but the most fanatical leaders." - Alphonse de Lamartine, fully Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine
"As diamond cuts diamond, and one hone smoothes a second, all the parts of intellect are whetstones to each other; and genius, which is but the result of their mutual sharpening, is character, too. " - Cyrus Augustus Bartol
"First, make yourself a reputation for being a creative genius. Second, surround yourself with partners who are better than you are. Third, leave them to go get on with it. " - David Ogilvy
"Let us examine more closely the significance of this vague word, reality. It may have several meanings, according to the different points of view which one takes. We may regard it as embodied in the physical world, the world of land and sea, of sky and trees, of sunshine and of storm. The real therefore will be to us that which we can touch and see, smell and taste, as one will say, "I know that is real for I can see it with my eyes." Seeing is believing, and the testimony of the senses is the superior court of appeal in controverted questions. But the world of reality may be regarded from quite a different point of view, as the world of consciousness, the mind of man, the experiences of the inner self, the Ego. Here is a world of phenomena interrelated and reciprocally dependent. It is a realm of ideas, of memory images, of fancy, of will, and of desire. The verities in this world cannot be seen, or measured, or weighed, and yet we do not hesitate to speak of them as realities; they are real as the love of friends is real, or the anger of a foe. The passion of a Romeo, the will of a Napoleon, the genius of a Goethe ... these are realities." - John Grier Hibben
"There is but one quality necessary for the perfect understanding of character, one quality that, if man have it, he may dare to judge—that is, omniscience. Most people study character as a proofreader pores over a great poem: his ears are dulled to the majesty and music of the lines, his eyes are darkened to the magic imagination of the genius of the author; that proofreader is busy watching for an inverted comma, a misspacing, or a wrong font letter. He has an eye trained for the imperfections, the weaknesses." - William George Jordan
"The genius - in his works, in his deeds - is necessarily a prodigal: his greatness lies in the fact that he expends himself. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light." - George Steiner, fully Francis George Steiner
"Language is like amber in its efficacy to circulate the electric spirit of truth, it is also like amber in embalming and preserving the relics of ancient wisdom, although one is not seldom puzzled to decipher its contents. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but which, in the course of ages, have passed out of sight and been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths, of which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse in a happy moment of divination." - George Augustus Sala, fully George Augustus Henry Sala
"The function of a genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve." - Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton
"Leadership is leaders acting – as well as caring, inspiring and persuading others to act – for cetain shared goals that represent the values – the wants and needs, the aspirations and expectations – of themselves and the people they represent. And the genius of leadership lies in the manner in which leaders care about, visualize, and act on their own and their followers’ values and motivations." - James MacGregor Burns
"Chance... in the accommodation peculiar to sensorimotor intelligence, plays the same role as in scientific discovery. It is only useful to the genius and its revelations remain meaningless to the unskilled. " - Jean Piaget
"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. " - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
"He who seldom speaks, and with one calm well-timed word can strike dumb the loquacious, is a genius or a hero." - Johann Kaspar Lavater
"First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire." - John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
"The genius of capitalism consists precisely in its lack of morality. Unless he is rich enough to hire his own choir, a capitalist is a fellow who, by definition, can ill afford to believe in anything other than the doctrine of the bottom line. Deprive a capitalist of his God-given right to lie and cheat and steal, and the poor sap stands a better than even chance of becoming one of the abominable wards of the state from whose grimy fingers the Reagan Administration hopes to snatch the ark of democracy." - Lewis H. Lapham
"A strong determination to get the best out of life; a keen desire to enjoy what one has, and no regrets if one fails; this is the secret of the Chinese genius for contentment." - Lin Yutang
" Genius is allied to a warm and inflammable constitution, delicacy of taste to calmness and sedateness. Hence it is common to find genius in one who is a prey to every passion; but seldom delicacy of taste. Upon a man possessed of this blessing, the moral duties, no less than the fine arts, make a deep impression, and counterbalance every irregular desire; at the same time, a temper calm and sedate is not easily moved, even by a strong temptation." -
"Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes not victories without it. " - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit." - Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
"As the mind learns to understand more complicated combinations of ideas, simpler formulae soon reduce their complexity; so truths that were discovered only by great effort, that could at first only be understood by men capable of profound thought, are soon developed and proved by methods that are not beyond the reach of common intelligence. The strength and the limits of man?s intelligence may remain unaltered; and yet the instruments that he uses will increase and improve, the language that fixes and determines his ideas will acquire greater breadth and precision and, unlike mechanics where an increase of force means a decrease of speed, the methods that lead genius to the discovery of truth increase at once the force and the speed of its operations." - Marquis de Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat
"An average person with average talents and average ambition can outstrip the most brilliant genius in our society; if that person has clear focused goals." - Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash
"It is no more natural and no less conventional to shout in anger or to kiss in love than to call a table 'a table'. Feelings and passional conduct are invented like words. Even those which like paternity seem to be part and parcel of the human make-up are in reality institutions. It is impossible to superimpose on man a lower layer of behavior which one chooses to call 'natural' followed by a manufactured cultural or spiritual world. Everything is both manufactured and natural in man as it were in the sense that there is not a word, not a form of behavior which does not owe something to purely biological being and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of animal life and cause forms of vital behavior to deviate from their pre-ordained direction through a sort of leakage and through a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man." - Maurice Merleau-Ponty
"Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction and I am convinced that chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue." - Maximilien Robespierre, fully Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre
"Love in all its greater expressions requires dedication as well as natural attraction, and steadfastness through many kinds of difficulty. But it is always renewable, and it can take root anywhere. Indeed, it is part of the genius of love that it can be summoned in situations where its existence at first seems impossible." - Michael Murphy
"Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"If the believer has his troubles with evil, the atheist has more and graver difficulties to contend with. Reality stumps him altogether, leaving him baffled not by one consideration but by many, from the existence of natural law through the instinctual cunning of the insect to the brain of the genius and the heart of the prophet. This then is the intellectual reason for believing in God: That, though this belief is not free from difficulties, it stands out, head and shoulders, as the best answer to the riddle of the universe." - Milton Steinberg
"Whatever is highest and holiest is tinged with melancholy. The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos." - Lydia Maria Child
"Men of genius are the worst possible models for men of talent." - Murray D. Lincoln, fully Murray Danforth Lincoln