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Exlpore more Genius quotes
"Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, or is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent."
"A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else."
"What is a genius? A person who demands little to nothing from others, but is often found extremely difficult to have around."
"Genius is an inner inherent intuition and perception. It is not a teachable condition."
"There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling."
"A genius does what he masters. An ordinary man tries to master what he does."
"In order to share one's true brilliance one initially has to risk looking like a fool: genius is like a wheel that spins so fast, it at first glance appears to be sitting still."
Explore more quotes by George Eliot
"It is a common sentence that knowledge is power, but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down."
"That is the way with us when we have any uneasy jealousy in our disposition: if our talents are chiefly of the burrowing kind, our honey-sipping cousin (whom we have grave reasons for objecting to) is likely to have a secret contempt for us, and any one who admires him passes an oblique criticism on ourselves. Having the scruples of rectitude in our souls, we are above the meanness of injuring him-rather we meet all his claims on us by active benefits; and the drawing of cheques for him, being a superiority which he must recognize, gives our bitterness a milder infusion."
"Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive."
"The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame."
"A man's mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass."
"For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love."
"Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm."
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