Quotes about Genius

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness.

Genius is the ability to act rightly without precedent - the power to do the right thing the first time.

Secondly, barbarous as these poor heathens are, they appear to be as capable of knowledge as we are; and in many places, at least, have discovered uncommon genius and tractableness; and I greatly question whether most of the barbarities practiced by them, have not originated in some real or supposed affront, and are therefore, more properly, acts of self-defence, than proofs of inhuman and blood-thirsty dispositions.

People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.

If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.

The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously; and those who have produced immortal works, have done so without knowing how or why. The greatest power operates unseen.

The spirit of Missions is the spirit of our Master: the very genius of His religion. A diffusive philanthropy is Christianity itself. It requires perpetual propagation to attest its genuineness.

Bambarré, 25th August, 1870.—One of my waking dreams is that the legendary tales about Moses coming up into Inner Ethiopia with Merr his foster-mother, and founding a city which he called in her honour "Meroe," may have a substratum of fact. He was evidently a man of transcendent genius, and we learn from the speech of St. Stephen that "he was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds.

What a Beethoven, Shakespeare or Picasso has done is not create something, so much as they have accessed that place within themselves from which they could express that which has been created by God.