Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
The best revenge is the massive success.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men that is genius.
It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.
I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?
The mathematician's best work is art, a high perfect art, as daring as the most secret dreams of imagination, clear and limpid. Mathematical genius and artistic genius touch one another.
THE SUFFERING OF GENIUS AND ITS VALUE. The artistic genius desires to give pleasure, but if his mind is on a very high plane he does not easily find anyone to share his pleasure; he offers entertainment but nobody accepts it. That gives him, in certain circumstances, a comically touching pathos; for he has no right to force pleasure on men. He pipes, but none will dance: can that be tragic?
Governmental aid is a drawback rather than an assistance, as, although it may facilitate in the routine of artistic production, it is an impediment to the development of true artistic genius.
The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] the good musician, and the immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason.
The great moral teachers of humanity were in a way artistic geniuses in the art of living.
Mandelstam was an artistic genius, the sort that any century produces only a handful of.
Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.
The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world ofits own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.
or simply:
