Quotes about Genius

If you would create something, you must be something.

“The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time."

Neither genius, fame, nor love show the greatness of the soul. Only kindness can do that.

A genius is always on duty. Even his dreams are tax-deductible.

AWESOMENESS is not a privilege, but the full bloom of a seed that grows within us, that rewards us upon fulfilling one potential after another.

Men give me some credit for genius.  All the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly.  Day and night it is before me.  I explore it in all its bearings.  My mind becomes pervaded with it.   Then the effort which I make is what the people call the fruit of genius.  It is the fruit of labor and thought.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Every genius thinks INWARDLY toward his Mind instead of outwardly toward his senses. The genius can hear sounds coming out of the silence with his inner ears. He can vision non-existent forms with his inner eyes and he can feel the rhythms of God's thinking and His knowing -- which are a blank slate to the man who believes that HE is his body. When a human rises to the exalted state of genius, he becomes a co-Creator with God. The beginning of creative expression in man is the first evidence of the unfolding Light of his genius, for no man who is purely sense-controlled can create. He can remember and repeat the records which he has imprinted upon his physical brain, but his brain has no knowledge. Therefore, he cannot create. Man can create only with his Mind -- and the brain is not the Mind. The brain is merely the seat of sensation and the electric recorder of sensation.

I often joke with my audiences that I make most of my income on a ski pole. People smile but they get my point. You need to make time for your genius to flow. We get our creative bursts, those idea torrents that take our business and personal lives to the next level, while we are skiing or drinking coffee in a Starbucks or walking in the woods or meditation with a sunrise. Those pursuits are not a waste of time. Creativity comes when you are relaxed, happy and enjoying the moment. And when it comes, it brings ideas that rock your world.

Genius awaits him who listens.  The messages of genius are for the Soul of man.  The senses of man comprehend them not.

Gabrilowitsch was a musician all the way through. It might interest you to know that when Gabrilowitsch posed for the bust I did of him, he looked no more like a musician than a colonel in the Army, or a lawyer. After half an hour of work, I said, “I want to see you as a musician. I want to see music in your eyes. I want to see the very soul of music in you because that is what you are. I do not want to do a bust of you just as an ordinary human being.” “What shall I do?” he asked. “Go to the piano and play,“ I said. “I cannot play for an audience of one. I could play for an audience of a thousand, but not for one,” he replied. “Yes, you can,” I replied, “you just play and forget me and I will take care of my part.” He played for an hour or two at a time for sixteen hours. I was then able to interpret him as a musician. I think that is one of the best things I have ever done – it portrays a man actually inspired by thinking music.

Beyond the genius is the mystic.
The mystic is one who has attained cosmic consciousness by a complete severance of the seats of consciousness and sensation. He is then almost totally unaware of his body and is totally aware of the Light of God centering him. Omniscience comes to him in that timeless blinding flash of light which is characteristic of a complete severance. This experience was described in the illumination of St. Paul. Every timeless flash of intense inspiration which comes to any man is a partial illumination, for inspiration is the manner in which new knowledge comes to man from the cosmos.
Of all mystics, Jesus was the outstanding example of all time. He was the only One in all history to have known complete cosmic-conscious unity with God.
The Bible refers to cosmic-conscious experience as “the illumination” or “being in the Light” or “in the Spirit.”
In all history less than forty cases of partial cosmic consciousness are known, and probably not more that three of these anywhere nearly approached the complete state of illumination experienced by the Nazarene.
Cosmic Consciousness is the ultimate goal of all mankind. All will know it before the long journey of man is finished, but there are many in this new age just dawning who are ready for it in part, if not fully.
Many desire it fully, but it is best that it come bit by bit for the complete severance is very dangerous. The ecstasy of this supreme experience is so great that one does not wish to come back. The power of severance of soul from body is within easy accomplishment, but to step back into the body is very difficult.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out I’d come to Perver City. Technically a suburb of New Age City, Perver City is where all the people who can’t make it in New Age City wind up.

"The word genius was whispered into my ear, the first thing I ever heard, while I was still mewling in my crib. So it never occurred to me that I wasn't until middle age."

The unseen energy that was once in Shakespeare or Picasso or Galileo or any human form, is also available to all of us. That is because the spirit energy does not die, it simply changes form.

“(Martin) Heidegger notes that the origin of the word “technology” comes from the Greek word techne, and this word was applied not only to technology, but to art, and artistic technique as well.  'Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was also called techne.'  He found this to be a numinous correspondence, and considered that, in art, the 'saving power' capable of confronting the abyss of the technological enframing might be found.

If art contains a saving power, it is not in the atomized artworks produced by individual subjects, but in a deeper collective vision that sees the world as a work of art, one that is already, as (Sri) Nisargadatta (Maharaj) and (Terrence) McKenna suggest, perfect in its 'satisfying all-at-onceness'.'  Instead of envisioning an ultimately boring 'technological singularity,' we might be better served by considering an evolution of technique, of skillful means, aimed at this world, as it is now.  Technology might find its proper place in our lives if we experienced such a shift in perspective–in a society oriented around technique, we might find that we desired far less gadgetry.  We might start to prefer slowness to speed, subtlety and complexity to products aimed at standardized mind.  Rather than projecting the spiritual quest and the search for the good life onto futuristic A.I.s,  we could actually take the time to fulfill those goals, here and now, in the present company of our friends and lovers.

Part of the problem seems embedded in the basic concept of a concrescence or singularity, which compacts our possibilities rather than expands them.  The notion of a technological singularity reflects our culture's obsessive rationality, reducing qualitative aspects of being to quantifiable factors, and imposing abstract systems over complex variables.  Instead of a technological singularity, we might reorient our thinking toward a more desirable multiplicity of technique.  Technique is erotic in essence; it is what Glenn Gould or Thelonious Monk expresses through the piano–the interplay between learned skill and quantum improvisation that is the stuff of genius.  Technique embraces the now-ness of our living world; technology throws us into endless insatiation.”

Genius is nothing but a greater aptitude for patience.

Of course, a psychologist would find it more direct to study the inspired poet. He would make concrete studies of inspiration in individual geniuses. But for all that, would he experience the phenomena of inspiration? His human documentation gathered from inspired poets could hardly be related, except from the exterior, in an ideal of objective observations. Comparison of inspired poets would soon make us lose sight of inspiration.

Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path . . . It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts for distinction.

  The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

If you want your children to be brilliant, read them fairly tales.
If you want them to be geniuses, read them more fairy tales.

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

My definition [of genius] would be about being completely involved in your art form. So that's outside of sciences. Within the arts it's about taking people on a journey, being able to involve me completely-whether you're singing a song, whether it's in the theater, whether you're dancing-if you can make me forget I'm sitting in a seat, that's my definition of genius.

He's definitely one of those horses that walks the fine line between genius and insanity.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preéstablishcd harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give hint no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

"Be the artist you were born to be."

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.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

It is unethical not to know. It is unethical not to think. It is unethical not to love. It is unethical not to live an impassioned life. It is unethical not to attain greatness. It is unethical to succumb to the fear of envy and the conspiracy of mediocrity. It is unethical not to self-bestow genius. It is unethical not to be the first monkey.