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dc5e735 I'm a misunderstood genius. 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. violence inspirational complexity elegance simplicity genius 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." [ ]" -- stupidity genius 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. humor genius 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? realisation genius radical insanity 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 the-sea-of-the-monsters percy-jackson-and-the-olympians rick-riordan 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 hermann-hesse institution teachers genius students school 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. virtue kindness strength intelligence epithets good-nature serene insolence malice arrogance genius logic 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. time seed social proust genius talent intellect 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. evolution myth true nature reason fear science atonement origin-of-species orthodox-christianity false clergy garden-of-eden original-sin orthodox biology charles-darwin fact investigation geology dogma survival-of-the-fittest darwin genius england ignorance superstition Robert Green Ingersoll
71c60e3 The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination criticism imagination genius-stupidity nerdery critics art genius nerds nerd artist 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. imagination creative-vision famous-artists famous-minds great-geniuses-of-world-history historic-inventors leonardo-da-vinci genius creativity 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. love genius-separateness genius Anaïs Nin
eda2c9d this was business. funny clumsy fairies-leprecon mental genius 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. words literature books dreams national-poetry-month famous-quotes-from-classic-books literary-inspiration endurance nanowrimo prolific-authors writers-and-writing famous-authors the-writing-life determination language genius writers creativity jack-kerouac Aberjhani
a3198ff Let's fly away and live forever good life relativity forever genius crazy 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. bravery future humanity intelligence brainiac breed caveman gatherer hunter-gatherer intensive-care patients athleticism hunter complexity geeks society genius brains nerds hospital mastery 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. poetry meanness genius mediocrity 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" writing reality william-blake genius 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." -- hermit social-anxiety satire society genius insanity Douglas Adams
67293ff So the whole war is beause we can't talk to each other. war miscommunication genius Orson Scott Card
6ef1d62 Just because they didn't know they were killing human beings doesn't mean they weren't killing human beings. killing genius humans 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... hate life love enemy genius 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! funny humor richard-p-feynman richard-phillips-feynman richard-feynman feynman read genius joke favorite Gian-Carlo Rota
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. war live ender enemy genius Orson Scott Card
9e4123c Nights were so real that days began to seem dreamlike to him life ender genius Orson Scott Card
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." love-triangles coward layla solution genius 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." humor love genius 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. learning thomas-edison richard-wagner napoleon-bonaparte raphael extraordinary nurture study training genius talent william-shakespeare Mark Twain
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. life love truth forgivness ender comprehension genius regret crazy 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. sleep life truth purpuse ender genius Orson Scott Card
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. time mind discovery poetry science fossils cuvier discoverer feeble george-byron george-gordon-byron george-gordon-noel george-gordon-noel-byron georges-cuvier historian montmartre treatise urals lord-byron immensity civilization geology space genius natural turmoil poet memory Honoré de Balzac
041ceae We don't punish the ones who fail. They just-don't go on, life love fail genius failure 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 light work science immense picture sagacity vast landscape perfectionism goal realm task genius Denis Diderot
084ff2e "Don't make fun of me!" Ender said. "I'm afraid I'm going crazy." life truth crazyness ender genius Orson Scott Card
cce4ac1 "[Free trade agreements] are trade agreements that don't socialism politics brilliant bush corporatocracy coup-d-état democratic dictator free-trade gore green-party inefficiency lincoln nader reform protectionism ralph-nader transparency intelligent washington progressive corporations terrorism corruption rich obama genius jefferson government fascism capitalism communism 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. genius games Orson Scott Card
c742774 It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it. life truth genius trick Orson Scott Card
a781adf For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire. personality feelings life ender genius Orson Scott Card
6889189 The classes were valuable, but the real education was the game. war live world life truth genius game 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. . heroic bravery sacrifice heart king-william benefit ernst-haeckel haeckel homage eliot glory george-eliot queen-victoria chance genius sublime intellect colossus Robert G. Ingersoll
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. life love push ender genius crazy 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. genius failure Raymond Weaver
0ff366f "In my dreams," said Ender, "I'm never sure whether I'm really me." dreams ender genius person crazy Orson Scott Card
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) motivational genius Malcolm Gladwell
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. nature poetry writing definition-of-genius mary-daly workshop writing-tips ralph-waldo-emerson emerson transcendentalism decay creative-process genius process Robert D. Richardson
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 perspiration introverts talent Susan Cain
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. earth heaven dreams genius Robert Bly
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. routine preparation genius 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 infinite-jest genius modesty D.T. Max
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. romantic french-lit genius 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 human-being stupidity genialità stupidita genius Umberto Eco
2ec4909 She did not need a library; she was a library. learning intelligence genius Elizabeth Gilbert
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
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. inspirational innovator brilliant apple computers innovation genius technology Walter Isaacson
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
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