Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

I regret that I must so continually use the word genius, as if that should apply only to a caste as well defined from those below as income-tax payers are from the untaxed. The word genius was very probably invented by a man who had small claims on it himself; greater men would have understood better what to be a genius really was, and probably they would have come to see that the word could be applied to most people. Goethe said that perhaps only a genius is able to understand a genius.

The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply.

I wouldn't want to compare myself to David Byrne whom I consider a genius, but what I think what we have in common is that he's also a guy who is very interested in the world and who has a lot of passions beyond singing and playing guitar.

Genius does not care much for a set of explicit regulations, but that does not mean that genius is lawless.

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

Genius is talent in which character makes itself heard.

Genius--the free and harmonious play of all the faculties of a human being.

I have often noticed that the need for cash and the production of a masterpiece just don't coincide with me. Money will hit me at a big off-period and genius will hit me in starvation, that is, I often get the money when I don't think I deserve it and have been lolling around for days and days thinking the most abysmal thoughts.

Talent is a tenant in the house owned by genius.

That genius is feeble which cannot hold its own before the masterpieces of the world.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Anything imagined can be made real ... given sufficient genius.

Genius is the father of a heavenly line, but the mortal mother, that is industry.

Even the people who have it do not definitely know what genius is.

Let a man of genius make use [of photography] as it should be used, and he will raise himself to a height that we do not know.

If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius.

My genius is in my nostrils.

If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses?

The secret to a masterpiece is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.

Humor is one of the elements of genius--admirable as an adjunct; but as soon as it becomes dominant, only a surrogate for genius.

Talent is full of thoughts, Genius is thought. Talent is a cistern, Genius a fountain.

I will write a book one day about how I feel about every aspect of Emily Stone. She's a full genius. She has found her genius and is giving it all so fully and beautifully. I think everyone who works with her, brushes shoulders with her, or even makes eye contact with her, gets a shot of sunshine.

I like looking at geniuses and listening to beautiful people.

Genius differs from talent not by the amount of original thoughts, but by making the latter fertile and by positioning them properly, in other words, by integrating everything into a whole, whereas talent produces only fragments, no matter how beautiful.