This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Genius must be born, and never can be taught." - John Dryden
"Our object in life should be to accumulate a great number of questions to be asked and resolved in eternity. Now we ask the sage, the genius, the philosopher, the divine, but none can tell; but we will open our queries to other respondents - we will ask angels, redeemed spirits, and God." - John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
"The full use of taste is an act of genius." - John LaFarge
"Genius is only a superior power of seeing." - John Ruskin
"Because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. that so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time." - John Stuart Mill
"Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time." - John Stuart Mill
"Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time." - John Stuart Mill
"If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius." - Joseph Addison
"Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation, as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn." - Joseph Addison
"There is more beauty in the works of a great genius who is ignorant of all the rules of art, than in the works of a little genius, who not only knows but scrupulously observes them." - Joseph Addison
"Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them." - Joseph Joubert
"Two sorts of writers possess genius; those who think and those who cause others to think." - Joseph Roux
"Genius ain't anything more that elegant common sense." - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
"Do not give to genius, but take from him! Thus only shall you be honoring him. do not mourn for him, but be merry, and drink deeply of his wisdom. Only thus will you be paying him the tribute rightly his." - Kahlil Gibran
"Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character and one of the best instruments of success. Without it, genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"The power of applying attention, steady and undissipated, to a single object, is the sure mark of a superior genius." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"One of the commonest mistakes and one of the costliest thinking that success is due to some genius, some magic - something or other which we do not possess. Success is generally due to holding one, and failure to letting go. You decide to learn a language, study music, take a course of reading, train yourself physically. Will it be success or failure? It depends upon how much pluck and perseverance that word “decide” contains. The decision that nothing can overrule, the grip that nothing can detach will bring success." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"Genius is fostered by industry." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The convivium is rest from labours, release from cares and nourishment of genius; it is the demonstration of love and splendour, the food of good will, the seasoning of friendship, the leavening of grace and the solace of life... Everything should be seasoned with the salt of genius and illumined by the rays of mind and manners." - Marsilio Ficino
"The genius of life is its variety. If you played one note and kept playing it all of the time, you’d go nuts. It’s the blending of the different notes that make the music." - Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
"Genius is the ability to act wisely without precedent - power to do the right thing the first time." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Both wit and understanding are trifles without integrity. The ignorant peasant without fault is greater than the philosopher with many. What is genius or courage without a heart?" - Oliver Goldsmith
"I know of no teachers so powerful and persuasive as the little army of specialists. They carry no banners, they beat no drums; but where they are men learn that bustle and push are not the equals of quiet genius and serene mastery." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius. Talent is a docile creature. It bows its head meekly while the world slips the collar over it." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"Conformity and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men and of the human frame, A mechanized automaton." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Even genius is tied to profit." - Pindar NULL
"Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny. Virtue is free, and as a an honors or dishonors her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility of the chooser." - Plato NULL
"Do not train boys to learning by force and harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each." - Plato NULL
"Do not, then, train boys to learning by force and harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be the better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each." - Plato NULL
"Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who would inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily time-worn yoke of their opinions." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"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. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Trust thyself. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider, and should be wise in season, and not fetter himself with duties which will embitter his days, and spoil for him his proper work." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Genius is sacrificed to talent every day... The difference between Talent and Genius is, that Talent says things which he has never heard but once, and Genius things which he has never heard... Genius is power; talent is applicability." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"In every work of genius we recognize our rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is a problem that genius can very well solve - to illuminate every low or trite word you can offer it. Give you rubbish to Shakespeare, he will give it all back to you in gold and stars." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective nature?" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"No power of genius has ever yet have the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nothing will supply the want of sunshine to peaches and, to make knowledge valuable you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom. Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished. The joy of the spirit indicates its strength. All healthy things are sweet-tempered. Genius works in sport, and goodness smiles to the last." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom, another's folly as one beholds the same objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in his duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself, which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? The debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature?" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where molt the wings which bear it farther than suns and stars. He who would inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of their men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time worn yoke of their opinions." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Talent finds its models, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art." -