The division of labor, which has brought such perfection in mechanical industries, is altogether fatal when applied to productions of the mind. All work of the mind is superior in proportion as the mind that produces it is universal.
Hunger is the handmaid of genius.
Philosophy and the arts are but a manifestation of the intelligible ideas that move the public mind; and thus they become visible images of the nations whence they emanate.
Style supposes the reunion and the exercise of all the intellectual faculties. The style is the man.
Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses.
There is a wide difference between the original thinker and the merely learned man.
Beauty and Genius must be kept afar if one would avoid becoming their slave.
The history of scientific and technical discovery teaches us that the human race is poor in independent and creative imagination. Even when the external and scientific requirements for the birth of an idea have long been there, it generally needs an external stimulus to make it actually happen; man has, so to speak, to stumble right up against the thing before the idea comes.
The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination
Invention requires both disciplines, strict common sense and wild imagination.
Science contributes to our culture in many ways, as a creative intellectual activity in its own right, as the light which has served to illuminate man's place in the universe, and as the source of understanding of man's own nature.
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
Real smarts begin when you quit quoting other people.
The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.
The job of intellectuals is to come up with ideas, and all we've been producing is footnotes.
Fancy, an animal faculty, is very different from imagination, which is intellectual. The former is passive; but the latter is active and creative. Children, the weak minded, and the timid are full of fancy. Men and women of intellect, of great intellect, are alone possessed of great imagination.
The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nations, and from the mass of the nation only—not from its privileged classes.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
The belly is the giver of genius.
Beware the artist who's an intellectual also. The artist who doesn't fit.
There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.
The constructive intellect [genius] produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature.
The imagination never forgets; it is a re-membering. It is not foundationless, but most reasonable, and it alone uses all the knowledge of the intellect.
Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.
The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning.
Those who are clever in imagination are far more pleased with themselves than prudent men could reasonably be.
