Genius

"Genius after all aint ennything more than elegant kommon sense."

"It is paltry philosophy if in the old-fashioned way one lays down rules and principles in total disregard of moral values. As soon as these appear one regards them as exceptions, which gives them a certain scientific status, and thus makes them into rules. Or again one may appeal to genius, which is above all rules; which amounts to admitting that rules are not only made for idiots, but are idiotic in themselves."

"Watson and Crick were touted as the geniuses of molecular biology and lionized by the media. When a field is new, or newly fascinating in the public eye, a genius (or pair of geniuses) can become a lightning rod for the publics adulation; and molecular biology may never have another scientist who will attain the fame of Watson and Crick."

"The man of génie is he whose ranging soul occupies itself with all that is in nature, receiving from her no idea that is not roused by his distinctive play of emotion. All is brought to life, turned to account; nothing is lost, nothing wasted.... He casts upon nature an eye gifted for the comprehension of abysses.... As for his constructs, they are too audacious for ordinary reason to inhabit.... In the arts as in the sciences … the genius seems to change the very nature of things; his character envelops whatever it touches; he casts into the future his piercing lights; he leaps ahead of his century, and it is powerless to follow him. He leaves behind those intellects which seek, even rightly, as may be, to criticize — poor lockstepped minds which leave nature as they found it. Behold him they may but are powerless to know him. For the genius alone may tell us truly who and what he is."

"So far as one understands a man, one is that man. The man of genius takes his place in the above argument as he who understands incomparably more other beings than the average man. Goethe is said to have said of himself that there was no vice or crime of which he could not trace the tendency in himself, and that at some period of his life he could not have understood fully. The genius, therefore, is a more complicated, more richly endowed, more varied man; and a man is the closer to being a genius the more men he has in his personality, and the more really and strongly he has these others within him."

"If it really were the case, as popular opinion has tried to establish, that the genius were separated from ordinary men by a thick wall through which no sound could penetrate, then all understanding of the efforts of genius would be denied to ordinary men, and their works would fail to make any impression on them. All hopes of progress depend on this being untrue. And it is untrue. The difference between men of genius and the others is quantitative not qualitative, of degree not of kind."

"Das "Genie" ist die sublimste Maschine, die es gibt,—folglich die zerbrechlichste."

"The genius is an omnipotent Ansich [in-itself] which as such would rock the whole world. For the sake of order, another figure appears along with him, namely, fate. Fate is nothing. It is the genius himself who discovers it, and the more profound the genius, the more profoundly he discovers fate, because that figure is merely the anticipation of providence."

"The life of the most successful writer has rarely been other than of toil and privation; and here I cannot but notice a singularly absurd "popular fancy," that genius and industry are incompatible. The one is inherent in the other. A mind so constituted has a restlessness in its powers, which forces them into activity."

"Gott denkt in den Genies, träumt in den Dichtern und schläft in den übrigen Menschen."

"Le génie n’est que l’enfance retrouvée à volonté."

"The wild force of genius has oft been fated by nature to be finally overcome by quiet strength.… The volcano sends up its red bolt with terrific force, as if it would strike the stars; but the calm, resistless hand of gravitation seizes it, and brings it to the earth."