genius

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
dc5e735	I'm a misunderstood genius.	genius misunderstood	Bill Watterson
5aa4483	Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.	complexity elegance genius inspirational simplicity violence	E.F. Schumacher
055146c	"When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." [ ]" --	genius stupidity	Jonathan Swift
e2c6467	"The Genius Of The Crowd there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day and the best at murder are those who preach against it and the best at hate are those who preach love and the best at war finally are those who preach peace those who preach god, need god those who preach peace do not have peace those who preach peace do not have love beware the preachers beware the knowers beware those who are always reading books beware those who either detest poverty or are proud of it beware those quick to praise for they need praise in return beware those who are quick to censor they are afraid of what they do not know beware those who seek constant crowds for they are nothing alone beware the average man the average woman beware their love, their love is average seeks average but there is genius in their hatred there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you to kill anybody not wanting solitude not understanding solitude they will attempt to destroy anything that differs from their own not being able to create art they will not understand art they will consider their failure as creators only as a failure of the world not being able to love fully they will believe your love incomplete and then they will hate you and their hatred will be perfect like a shining diamond like a knife like a mountain like a tiger	genius	Charles Bukowski
f16a6b6	Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.	genius	Oscar Wilde
3ab6bca	A genius. A criminal mastermind. A millionaire. And he is only twelve years old.	genius humor	Eoin Colfer
5cc97f0	I've proved my point. I've demonstrated there's no difference between me and everyone else! All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day. You had a bad day once, am I right? I know I am. I can tell. You had a bad day and everything changed. Why else would you dress up as a flying rat? You had a bad day, and it drove you as crazy as everybody else... Only you won't admit it! You have to keep pretending that life makes sense, that there's some point to all this struggling! God you make me want to puke. I mean, what is it with you? What made you what you are? Girlfriend killed by the mob, maybe? Brother carved up by some mugger? Something like that, I bet. Something like that... Something like that happened to me, you know. I... I'm not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! Ha ha ha! But my point is... My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was, I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can't you? I mean, you're not unintelligent! You must see the reality of the situation. Do you know how many times we've come close to world war three over a flock of geese on a computer screen? Do you know what triggered the last world war? An argument over how many telegraph poles Germany owed its war debt creditors! Telegraph poles! Ha ha ha ha HA! It's all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for... it's all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can't you see the funny side? Why aren't you laughing?	genius insanity radical realisation	Alan Moore
e252fd8	"Which reminded me...I still owed the gods a debt. "You're a genius," I (Percy) told Annabeth."	genius gods percy-jackson percy-jackson-and-the-olympians rick-riordan the-sea-of-the-monsters	Rick Riordan
e35d25d	Teachers dread nothing so much as unusual characteristics in precocious boys during the initial stages of their adolescence. A certain streak of genius makes an ominous impression on them, for there exists a deep gulf between genius and the teaching profession. Anyone with a touch of genius seems to his teachers a freak from the very first. As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. A schoolmaster will prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in his class than a single genius, and if you regard it objectively, he is of course right. His task is not to produce extravagant intellects but good Latinists, arithmeticians and sober decent folk. The question of who suffers more acutely at the other's hands - the teacher at the boy's, or vice versa - who is more of a tyrant, more of a tormentor, and who profanes parts of the other's soul, student or teacher, is something you cannot examine without remembering your own youth in anger and shame. yet that s not what concerns us here. We have the consolation that among true geniuses the wounds almost always heal. As their personalities develop, they create their art in spite of school. Once dead, and enveloped by the comfortable nimbus of remoteness, they are paraded by the schoolmasters before other generations of students as showpieces and noble examples. Thus teh struggle between rule and spirit repeats itself year after year from school to school. The authorities go to infinite pains to nip the few profound or more valuable intellects in the bud. And time and again the ones who are detested by their teachers are frequently punished, the runaways and those expelled, are the ones who afterwards add to society's treasure. But some - and who knows how many? - waste away quiet obstinacy and finally go under.	education genius hermann-hesse institution school students teachers	Hermann Hesse
0d36fa9	Kindness is strength. Good-nature is often mistaken for virtue, and good health sometimes passes for genius. Anger blows out the lamp of the mind. In the examination of a great and important question, every one should be serene, slow-pulsed, and calm. Intelligence is not the foundation of arrogance. Insolence is not logic. Epithets are the arguments of malice.	arrogance epithets genius good-nature insolence intelligence kindness logic malice serene strength virtue	Robert Green Ingersoll
bf0703e	But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.	genius intellect proust seed social talent time	Marcel Proust
5cd66a5	This century will be called 's century. He was one of the greatest men who ever touched this globe. He has explained more of the phenomena of life than all of the religious teachers. . Think of the men who replied to him. Only a few years ago there was no person too ignorant to successfully answer , and the more ignorant he was the more cheerfully he undertook the task. He was held up to the ridicule, the scorn and contempt of the Christian world, and yet when he died, England was proud to put his dust with that of her noblest and her grandest. conquered the intellectual world, and his doctrines are now accepted facts. His light has broken in on some of the clergy, and the greatest man who to-day occupies the pulpit of one of the orthodox churches, Henry Ward Beecher, is a believer in the theories of --a man of more genius than all the clergy of that entire church put together. ...The church teaches that man was created perfect, and that for six thousand years he has degenerated. demonstrated the falsity of this dogma. He shows that man has for thousands of ages steadily advanced; . Religion and science are enemies. One is a superstition; the other is a fact. One rests upon the false, the other upon the true. One is the result of fear and faith, the other of investigation and reason.	atonement biology charles-darwin clergy darwin dogma england evolution fact false fear garden-of-eden genius geology ignorance investigation myth nature origin-of-species original-sin orthodox orthodox-christianity reason science superstition survival-of-the-fittest true	Robert Green Ingersoll
71c60e3	The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination	art artist criticism critics genius genius-stupidity imagination nerd nerdery nerds	Nassim Nicholas Taleb
fd3e3b7	Vision without execution is hallucination. .. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo [da Vinci] knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history's consummate innovator.	creative-vision creativity famous-artists famous-minds genius great-geniuses-of-world-history historic-inventors imagination leonardo-da-vinci	Walter Isaacson
ec0244f	I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.	genius genius-separateness love	Anaïs Nin
eda2c9d	this was business.	clumsy fairies-leprecon funny genius mental	Eoin Colfer
ac897e9	I place my fingers upon these keys typing 2,000 dreams per minute and naked of spirit dance forth my cosmic vortex upon this crucifix called language.	books creativity determination dreams endurance famous-authors famous-quotes-from-classic-books genius jack-kerouac language literary-inspiration literature nanowrimo national-poetry-month prolific-authors the-writing-life words writers writers-and-writing	Aberjhani
a3198ff	Let's fly away and live forever	crazy forever genius good life relativity	Orson Scott Card
7b7de19	We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.	athleticism brainiac brains bravery breed caveman complexity future gatherer geeks genius hospital humanity hunter hunter-gatherer intelligence intensive-care mastery nerds patients society technology	Neal Stephenson
5e58518	Poetry destroyed? Genius banished? No! Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought. No; they not only live, but reign, and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell--the hell of your own meanness.	genius meanness mediocrity poetry	Charlotte Brontë
81bfb6a	"Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word"	genius reality william-blake writing	Brenda Ueland
19e9c7d	"Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do." The sign read: "Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion." "It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane." --	genius hermit insanity satire social-anxiety society	Douglas Adams
67293ff	So the whole war is beause we can't talk to each other.	genius miscommunication war	Orson Scott Card
6ef1d62	Just because they didn't know they were killing human beings doesn't mean they weren't killing human beings.	genius humans killing	Orson Scott Card
9c1ee5f	In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him...	enemy genius hate life love	Orson Scott Card
b852d0a	When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let's make damn sure we're the ones alive at the end.	ender enemy genius live war	Orson Scott Card
9e4123c	Nights were so real that days began to seem dreamlike to him	ender genius life	Orson Scott Card
6a2d044	Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!	favorite feynman funny genius humor joke read richard-feynman richard-p-feynman richard-phillips-feynman	Gian-Carlo Rota
68ad409	"A.Coward," he repeated, and I briefly considered picking up the vase in the center of the island and throwing it at him."Not making a choice is the coward's way out. You love both of them. I get that. But you don't feel the same kind of love for both of them, and the sooner you accept that the better."	coward genius layla love-triangles solution	Jennifer L. Armentrout
c0ab7e8	"As the doctor treated the wound, Mazer said, " I don't care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won't get you out of this school."	genius humor love	Orson Scott Card
5766731	I'll go from world to world until I find a time and place where you can come awake in safety. And I'll tell your story to my people, so that perhaps in time the can forgive you, too. The way that you've forgiven me.	comprehension crazy ender forgivness genius life love regret truth	Orson Scott Card
07efdb7	When we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wagner or an Edison or other extraordinary person, we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it is the atmosphere in which the talent was cradled that explains; it is the training it received while it grew, the nurture it got from reading, study, example, the encouragement it gathered from self-recognition and recognition from the outside at each stage of its development: when we know all these details, then we know why the man was ready when his opportunity came.	extraordinary genius learning napoleon-bonaparte nurture raphael richard-wagner study talent thomas-edison training william-shakespeare	Mark Twain
f80a855	Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones.	civilization cuvier discoverer discovery feeble fossils genius geology george-byron george-gordon-byron george-gordon-noel george-gordon-noel-byron georges-cuvier historian immensity lord-byron memory mind montmartre natural poet poetry science space time treatise turmoil urals	Honoré de Balzac
041ceae	We don't punish the ones who fail. They just-don't go on,	fail failure genius life love	Orson Scott Card
a1b53ae	He woke up and fought another battle and won. Then he went to bed and slept again and dreamed again and then he woke up and won again and slept again and he hardly noticed when waking became sleeping. Nor did he care.	ender genius life purpuse sleep truth	Orson Scott Card
6195623	I picture the vast realm of the sciences as an immense landscape scattered with patches of dark and light. The goal towards which we must work is either to extend the boundaries of the patches of light, or to increase their number. One of these tasks falls to the creative genius; the other requires a sort of sagacity combined with perfectionism.	creative dark genius goal immense landscape light perfectionism picture realm sagacity science task vast work	Denis Diderot
084ff2e	"Don't make fun of me!" Ender said. "I'm afraid I'm going crazy."	crazyness ender genius life truth	Orson Scott Card
cce4ac1	"[Free trade agreements] are trade agreements that don't	brilliant bush capitalism communism corporations corporatocracy corruption coup-d-état democratic dictator fascism free-trade genius gore government green-party inefficiency intelligent jefferson lincoln nader obama politics progressive protectionism ralph-nader reform rich socialism terrorism transparency washington	Ralph Nader
ac3079c	I'll become exactly the tool you want me to be, said Ender silently, but at least I wont be fooled into it. I'll do it because I choose to, not because you tricked me, you sly bastard.	games genius	Orson Scott Card
c742774	It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it.	genius life trick truth	Orson Scott Card
a781adf	For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.	ender feelings genius life personality	Orson Scott Card
6889189	The classes were valuable, but the real education was the game.	game genius life live truth war world	Orson Scott Card
031875e	Compare King William with the philosopher Haeckel. The king is one of the anointed by the most high, as they claim--one upon whose head has been poured the divine petroleum of authority. . Compare with Queen Victoria. The Queen is clothed in garments given her by blind fortune and unreasoning chance, while . The world is beginning to pay homage to intellect, to genius, to heart. We have advanced. .	benefit bravery chance colossus eliot ernst-haeckel genius george-eliot glory haeckel heart heroic homage intellect king-william queen-victoria sacrifice sublime	Robert G. Ingersoll
bc895fa	But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it's just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen. (p313)	genius motivational	Malcolm Gladwell
0ff366f	"In my dreams," said Ender, "I'm never sure whether I'm really me."	crazy dreams ender genius person	Orson Scott Card
b22690a	You don't know what would have happened if I hadn't pushed. Nobody knows. I did it the way I did it, and it worked. Above all, it worked.	crazy ender genius life love push	Orson Scott Card
1b2d5ae	He challenged the world with his genius, and the world defeated him by ignoring the challenge and starving him. He stopped writing because he had failed and because he had no choice but to accept the world's terms: there is no mystery here. This was not insanity, but common sense.	failure genius	Raymond Weaver
a73201d	Enmerson's interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a verb (as Mary Daly insists), poetry is the act of . The process of poetry also mimics the process of nature. 'This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change.' Another aspect of nature is genius, which, as Emerson observes, 'is the activity which repairs the decays of things.	creative-process decay definition-of-genius emerson genius mary-daly nature poetry process ralph-waldo-emerson transcendentalism workshop writing writing-tips	Robert D. Richardson
37e0c9d	It has been written that so much of life is preparation, so much is routine, and so much is retrospect that the purest essence of anyone's genius contracts itself to a precious few hours.	genius preparation routine	James D Hornfischer
26c0234	"When David Markson wrote in June to complain about an author's getting an award he though should have been his, Wallace gently warned him away from the pitfall of envy: "Mostly I try to remember how lucky I am to be able to write, and doubly, triply lucky I am that anyone else is willing to read it, to say nothing of publishing it. I'm no pollyanna - this keeping-the-spirits-up shit is hard work, and I don't often do it well. But I try... Life is good"	david-foster-wallace david-markson genius infinite-jest modesty	D.T. Max
dd291af	We have never understood how birds manage to fly, Nor who the genius is who makes up dreams, Now how heaven and earth can appear in a poem.	dreams earth genius heaven	Robert Bly
8df8ab9	If genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, then as a culture we tend to lionize the one percent.	genius giftednessss introverts perspiration talent	Susan Cain
2ec4909	She did not need a library; she was a library.	genius intelligence learning	Elizabeth Gilbert
630d895	I'd like to be in love like this description, wouldn't you? ...they moved among the carriages, the crowds, the noise, oblivious of everything but themselves, hearing nothing, as if they had been walking together in the country on a bed of dead leaves.	french-lit genius romantic	Gustave Flaubert
f4804e9	L'essere umano e davvero una creatura straordinaria. Ha scoperto il fuoco, edificato citta, scritto magnifiche poesie, dato interpretazioni del mondo, inventato mitologie etc... Ma allo stesso tempo non ha smesso di fare la guerra ai suoi simili, non ha smesso di ingannarsi, di distruggere l'ambiente circostante. La somma algebrica fra vigore intellettuale e coglioneria da un risultato quasi nullo. Dunque, decidendo di parlare di imbecillita, rendiamo in un certo senso omaggio a questa creatura che e per meta geniale, per meta imbecille	genialità genius human-being stupidity stupidita	Umberto Eco
257b37a	Was [Steve Jobs] smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. [...] Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead. Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of his time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world's most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology.	apple brilliant computers genius innovation innovator inspirational technology	Walter Isaacson
45dd950	Angeline, distraught over her son's obsession and afraid of the effects of the past year on Artemis's mind, signed her thirteen-year-old up for treatment with the school counselor. You have to feel sorry for him. The counselor, that is.	counseling genius	Eoin Colfer
48900b8	He needed a plan. Something audacious and brilliant. Something that had never been attempted before. Artemis was not unduly worried on that front. His brain had never let him down before.	genius planning	Eoin Colfer

I'm a misunderstood genius.

Bill Watterson

5aa4483

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

complexity elegance genius inspirational simplicity violence

E.F. Schumacher

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"When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." [ ]" --

genius stupidity

Jonathan Swift

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"The Genius Of The Crowd there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day and the best at murder are those who preach against it and the best at hate are those who preach love and the best at war finally are those who preach peace those who preach god, need god those who preach peace do not have peace those who preach peace do not have love beware the preachers beware the knowers beware those who are always reading books beware those who either detest poverty or are proud of it beware those quick to praise for they need praise in return beware those who are quick to censor they are afraid of what they do not know beware those who seek constant crowds for they are nothing alone beware the average man the average woman beware their love, their love is average seeks average but there is genius in their hatred there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you to kill anybody not wanting solitude not understanding solitude they will attempt to destroy anything that differs from their own not being able to create art they will not understand art they will consider their failure as creators only as a failure of the world not being able to love fully they will believe your love incomplete and then they will hate you and their hatred will be perfect like a shining diamond like a knife like a mountain like a tiger

genius

Charles Bukowski

f16a6b6

Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.

genius

Oscar Wilde

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A genius. A criminal mastermind. A millionaire. And he is only twelve years old.

genius humor

Eoin Colfer

5cc97f0

I've proved my point. I've demonstrated there's no difference between me and everyone else! All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day. You had a bad day once, am I right? I know I am. I can tell. You had a bad day and everything changed. Why else would you dress up as a flying rat? You had a bad day, and it drove you as crazy as everybody else... Only you won't admit it! You have to keep pretending that life makes sense, that there's some point to all this struggling! God you make me want to puke. I mean, what is it with you? What made you what you are? Girlfriend killed by the mob, maybe? Brother carved up by some mugger? Something like that, I bet. Something like that... Something like that happened to me, you know. I... I'm not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! Ha ha ha! But my point is... My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was, I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can't you? I mean, you're not unintelligent! You must see the reality of the situation. Do you know how many times we've come close to world war three over a flock of geese on a computer screen? Do you know what triggered the last world war? An argument over how many telegraph poles Germany owed its war debt creditors! Telegraph poles! Ha ha ha ha HA! It's all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for... it's all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can't you see the funny side? Why aren't you laughing?

genius insanity radical realisation

Alan Moore

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"Which reminded me...I still owed the gods a debt. "You're a genius," I (Percy) told Annabeth."

genius gods percy-jackson percy-jackson-and-the-olympians rick-riordan the-sea-of-the-monsters

Rick Riordan

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Teachers dread nothing so much as unusual characteristics in precocious boys during the initial stages of their adolescence. A certain streak of genius makes an ominous impression on them, for there exists a deep gulf between genius and the teaching profession. Anyone with a touch of genius seems to his teachers a freak from the very first. As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. A schoolmaster will prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in his class than a single genius, and if you regard it objectively, he is of course right. His task is not to produce extravagant intellects but good Latinists, arithmeticians and sober decent folk. The question of who suffers more acutely at the other's hands - the teacher at the boy's, or vice versa - who is more of a tyrant, more of a tormentor, and who profanes parts of the other's soul, student or teacher, is something you cannot examine without remembering your own youth in anger and shame. yet that s not what concerns us here. We have the consolation that among true geniuses the wounds almost always heal. As their personalities develop, they create their art in spite of school. Once dead, and enveloped by the comfortable nimbus of remoteness, they are paraded by the schoolmasters before other generations of students as showpieces and noble examples. Thus teh struggle between rule and spirit repeats itself year after year from school to school. The authorities go to infinite pains to nip the few profound or more valuable intellects in the bud. And time and again the ones who are detested by their teachers are frequently punished, the runaways and those expelled, are the ones who afterwards add to society's treasure. But some - and who knows how many? - waste away quiet obstinacy and finally go under.

education genius hermann-hesse institution school students teachers

Hermann Hesse

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Kindness is strength. Good-nature is often mistaken for virtue, and good health sometimes passes for genius. Anger blows out the lamp of the mind. In the examination of a great and important question, every one should be serene, slow-pulsed, and calm. Intelligence is not the foundation of arrogance. Insolence is not logic. Epithets are the arguments of malice.

arrogance epithets genius good-nature insolence intelligence kindness logic malice serene strength virtue

Robert Green Ingersoll

bf0703e

But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.

genius intellect proust seed social talent time

Marcel Proust

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This century will be called 's century. He was one of the greatest men who ever touched this globe. He has explained more of the phenomena of life than all of the religious teachers. . Think of the men who replied to him. Only a few years ago there was no person too ignorant to successfully answer , and the more ignorant he was the more cheerfully he undertook the task. He was held up to the ridicule, the scorn and contempt of the Christian world, and yet when he died, England was proud to put his dust with that of her noblest and her grandest. conquered the intellectual world, and his doctrines are now accepted facts. His light has broken in on some of the clergy, and the greatest man who to-day occupies the pulpit of one of the orthodox churches, Henry Ward Beecher, is a believer in the theories of --a man of more genius than all the clergy of that entire church put together. ...The church teaches that man was created perfect, and that for six thousand years he has degenerated. demonstrated the falsity of this dogma. He shows that man has for thousands of ages steadily advanced; . Religion and science are enemies. One is a superstition; the other is a fact. One rests upon the false, the other upon the true. One is the result of fear and faith, the other of investigation and reason.

atonement biology charles-darwin clergy darwin dogma england evolution fact false fear garden-of-eden genius geology ignorance investigation myth nature origin-of-species original-sin orthodox orthodox-christianity reason science superstition survival-of-the-fittest true

Robert Green Ingersoll

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The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

art artist criticism critics genius genius-stupidity imagination nerd nerdery nerds

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Vision without execution is hallucination. .. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo [da Vinci] knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history's consummate innovator.

creative-vision creativity famous-artists famous-minds genius great-geniuses-of-world-history historic-inventors imagination leonardo-da-vinci

Walter Isaacson

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I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.

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Anaïs Nin

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this was business.

clumsy fairies-leprecon funny genius mental

Eoin Colfer

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I place my fingers upon these keys typing 2,000 dreams per minute and naked of spirit dance forth my cosmic vortex upon this crucifix called language.

books creativity determination dreams endurance famous-authors famous-quotes-from-classic-books genius jack-kerouac language literary-inspiration literature nanowrimo national-poetry-month prolific-authors the-writing-life words writers writers-and-writing

Aberjhani

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Let's fly away and live forever

crazy forever genius good life relativity

Orson Scott Card

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We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.

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Neal Stephenson

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Poetry destroyed? Genius banished? No! Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought. No; they not only live, but reign, and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell--the hell of your own meanness.

genius meanness mediocrity poetry

Charlotte Brontë

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"Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word"

genius reality william-blake writing

Brenda Ueland

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"Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do." The sign read: "Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion." "It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane." --

genius hermit insanity satire social-anxiety society

Douglas Adams

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So the whole war is beause we can't talk to each other.

genius miscommunication war

Orson Scott Card

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Just because they didn't know they were killing human beings doesn't mean they weren't killing human beings.

genius humans killing

Orson Scott Card

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In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him...

enemy genius hate life love

Orson Scott Card

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When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let's make damn sure we're the ones alive at the end.

ender enemy genius live war

Orson Scott Card

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Nights were so real that days began to seem dreamlike to him

ender genius life

Orson Scott Card

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Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!

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Gian-Carlo Rota

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"A.Coward," he repeated, and I briefly considered picking up the vase in the center of the island and throwing it at him."Not making a choice is the coward's way out. You love both of them. I get that. But you don't feel the same kind of love for both of them, and the sooner you accept that the better."

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Jennifer L. Armentrout

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"As the doctor treated the wound, Mazer said, " I don't care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won't get you out of this school."

genius humor love

Orson Scott Card

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I'll go from world to world until I find a time and place where you can come awake in safety. And I'll tell your story to my people, so that perhaps in time the can forgive you, too. The way that you've forgiven me.

comprehension crazy ender forgivness genius life love regret truth

Orson Scott Card

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When we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wagner or an Edison or other extraordinary person, we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it is the atmosphere in which the talent was cradled that explains; it is the training it received while it grew, the nurture it got from reading, study, example, the encouragement it gathered from self-recognition and recognition from the outside at each stage of its development: when we know all these details, then we know why the man was ready when his opportunity came.

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Mark Twain

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Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones.

civilization cuvier discoverer discovery feeble fossils genius geology george-byron george-gordon-byron george-gordon-noel george-gordon-noel-byron georges-cuvier historian immensity lord-byron memory mind montmartre natural poet poetry science space time treatise turmoil urals

Honoré de Balzac

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We don't punish the ones who fail. They just-don't go on,

fail failure genius life love

Orson Scott Card

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He woke up and fought another battle and won. Then he went to bed and slept again and dreamed again and then he woke up and won again and slept again and he hardly noticed when waking became sleeping. Nor did he care.

ender genius life purpuse sleep truth

Orson Scott Card

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I picture the vast realm of the sciences as an immense landscape scattered with patches of dark and light. The goal towards which we must work is either to extend the boundaries of the patches of light, or to increase their number. One of these tasks falls to the creative genius; the other requires a sort of sagacity combined with perfectionism.

creative dark genius goal immense landscape light perfectionism picture realm sagacity science task vast work

Denis Diderot

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"Don't make fun of me!" Ender said. "I'm afraid I'm going crazy."

crazyness ender genius life truth

Orson Scott Card

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"[Free trade agreements] are trade agreements that don't

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Ralph Nader

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I'll become exactly the tool you want me to be, said Ender silently, but at least I wont be fooled into it. I'll do it because I choose to, not because you tricked me, you sly bastard.

games genius

Orson Scott Card

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It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it.

genius life trick truth

Orson Scott Card

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For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.

ender feelings genius life personality

Orson Scott Card

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The classes were valuable, but the real education was the game.

game genius life live truth war world

Orson Scott Card

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Compare King William with the philosopher Haeckel. The king is one of the anointed by the most high, as they claim--one upon whose head has been poured the divine petroleum of authority. . Compare with Queen Victoria. The Queen is clothed in garments given her by blind fortune and unreasoning chance, while . The world is beginning to pay homage to intellect, to genius, to heart. We have advanced. .

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Robert G. Ingersoll

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But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it's just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen. (p313)

genius motivational

Malcolm Gladwell

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"In my dreams," said Ender, "I'm never sure whether I'm really me."

crazy dreams ender genius person

Orson Scott Card

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You don't know what would have happened if I hadn't pushed. Nobody knows. I did it the way I did it, and it worked. Above all, it worked.

crazy ender genius life love push

Orson Scott Card

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He challenged the world with his genius, and the world defeated him by ignoring the challenge and starving him. He stopped writing because he had failed and because he had no choice but to accept the world's terms: there is no mystery here. This was not insanity, but common sense.

failure genius

Raymond Weaver

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Enmerson's interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a verb (as Mary Daly insists), poetry is the act of . The process of poetry also mimics the process of nature. 'This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change.' Another aspect of nature is genius, which, as Emerson observes, 'is the activity which repairs the decays of things.

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Robert D. Richardson

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It has been written that so much of life is preparation, so much is routine, and so much is retrospect that the purest essence of anyone's genius contracts itself to a precious few hours.

genius preparation routine

James D Hornfischer

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"When David Markson wrote in June to complain about an author's getting an award he though should have been his, Wallace gently warned him away from the pitfall of envy: "Mostly I try to remember how lucky I am to be able to write, and doubly, triply lucky I am that anyone else is willing to read it, to say nothing of publishing it. I'm no pollyanna - this keeping-the-spirits-up shit is hard work, and I don't often do it well. But I try... Life is good"

david-foster-wallace david-markson genius infinite-jest modesty

D.T. Max

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We have never understood how birds manage to fly, Nor who the genius is who makes up dreams, Now how heaven and earth can appear in a poem.

dreams earth genius heaven

Robert Bly

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If genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, then as a culture we tend to lionize the one percent.

genius giftednessss introverts perspiration talent

Susan Cain

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She did not need a library; she was a library.

genius intelligence learning

Elizabeth Gilbert

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I'd like to be in love like this description, wouldn't you? ...they moved among the carriages, the crowds, the noise, oblivious of everything but themselves, hearing nothing, as if they had been walking together in the country on a bed of dead leaves.

french-lit genius romantic

Gustave Flaubert

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L'essere umano e davvero una creatura straordinaria. Ha scoperto il fuoco, edificato citta, scritto magnifiche poesie, dato interpretazioni del mondo, inventato mitologie etc... Ma allo stesso tempo non ha smesso di fare la guerra ai suoi simili, non ha smesso di ingannarsi, di distruggere l'ambiente circostante. La somma algebrica fra vigore intellettuale e coglioneria da un risultato quasi nullo. Dunque, decidendo di parlare di imbecillita, rendiamo in un certo senso omaggio a questa creatura che e per meta geniale, per meta imbecille

genialità genius human-being stupidity stupidita

Umberto Eco

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Was [Steve Jobs] smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. [...] Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead. Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of his time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world's most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology.

apple brilliant computers genius innovation innovator inspirational technology

Walter Isaacson

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Angeline, distraught over her son's obsession and afraid of the effects of the past year on Artemis's mind, signed her thirteen-year-old up for treatment with the school counselor. You have to feel sorry for him. The counselor, that is.

counseling genius

Eoin Colfer

48900b8

He needed a plan. Something audacious and brilliant. Something that had never been attempted before. Artemis was not unduly worried on that front. His brain had never let him down before.

genius planning

Eoin Colfer