top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Genius is finding the invisible link between things."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Genius quotes
"A genius is a grown-up that did not grow up."
"A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else."
"This was genius at close quarters, and genius had that something above normal in it that was a great strain upon the ordinary mind and feeling. All five were different from each other, yet each had that curious quality of burning intensity, the single-mindedness of purpose that made such a terrifying impression. She did not know whether it were a quality of brain or rather a quality of outlook, of intensity. But each of them, she thought, was in his or her way a passionate idealist."
"Of all the things in the world, I'm particularly amazed at, is the conviction with which the MIND, endorses an Idea, which is phenomenal, as it differentiates the Genius from Mediocre, or not to forget the human stupidity in particular!"
"Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, or is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent."
"Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way, or even to say a simple thing in a simpler way."
Explore more quotes by Vladimir Nabokov
"I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading."
"Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths-until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about."
"It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow."
"My darling, what a cat they have! Something perfectly stupendous. Siamese, in colour dark beige, or taupe, with chocolate paws and the tail the same. Moreover, his tail is comparatively short, so his croup has something of a little dog, or rather, a kangaroo, and that's its colour, too. And that special silkiness of short fur, and some very tender white tints on its folds, and wonderful clear-blue eyes, turning transparently green towards evening, and a pensive tenderness of its walk, a sort of heavenly circumspection of movement. An amazing, sacred animal, and so quiet " it's unclear what he is looking at with those eyes filled to the brim with sapphire water."
"On such sunny, sad mornings I always feel in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven, and that salvation may be granted to me despite the frozen mud and horror in my heart."
"And perhaps it was precisely because she knew nothing at all about chess that chess for her was not simply a parlor game or a pleasant pastime, but a mysterious art equal to all the recognized arts. She had never been in close contact with such people - there was no one to compare him with except those inspired eccentrics, musicians and poets whose image one knows as clearly and as vaguely as that of a Roman Emperor, an inquisitor or a comedy miser. Her memory contained a modest dimly lit gallery with a sequence of all the people who had in any way caught her fancy."
"Logical reasoning may be a most convenient means of mental communication for covering short distances, but the curvature of the earth, alas, is reflected even in logic: an ideally rational progression of thought will finally bring you back to the point of departure where you return aware of the simplicity of genius, with a delightful sensation that you have embraced truth, while actually you have merely embraced your own self... anything you might term a deduction already exposes the flaw: logical development inexorably becomes an envelopment."
"A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things-how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver-and this inability enhanced my oppression."
bottom of page