Libby Burton > Libby's Quotes

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”
― Pearl S. Buck

“Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.”
― Claude Monet

“I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity.”
― William Blake

“Some were brilliant bordering on genius. Others, genius bordering on madness”
― Erich Segal

“Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest.”
― Mike Norton, White Mountain

“There is no off position on the genius button.”
― CBS Inc. CBS News.

“Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“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”
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

“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.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“Genius is the true mystery, and at its edge--the abyss.”
― Guillermo del Toro

“If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.”
― Richard Feynman

“Genius is finding the invisible link between things.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Music resembles poetry, in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach,
And which a master hand alone can reach.”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay On Criticism

“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.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Genius tries to conquer the world with art, with songs, with words; stupid tries to conquer it with sword, with guns, with arrows!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“But why would they do that? What is to be asked? He was a man who sees into things -- very ordinary things. A hat left on the floor of a café in Kingstown, a proverb overheard, an old fisherman mending a net: these, for him, were a kind of incitement. There are no answers other than that. He was not like the rest of us. Not even like himself. His imagination, or soul, or whatever province of his mind was hungry for the sustaining rain of the world, would soak in the storms of his own haunted strangeness, and the berries would bloom, and they were what they were, and if the tendrils were peculiar, and some of them wild, the fruits were so shockingly luscious and potent that the thirsty were willing to savour the bitter for the sake of the concomitant sweet. He needed the very ordinary. He was a beautiful man. What more than this need be said? The sort of man who makes you think the movement of foliage might be causing the breeze.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Ghost Light

“Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to be the same thing. They both have a tendency to blur the lines of what we call norms, or established reality. They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures.
-- from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius”
― Author-Poet Aberjhani, Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.

“You see Miss Gertrude is a genius. And a genius is a genius. So what if no one understands a word she writes. Some day they might.”
― Jonah Winter, Gertrude is Gertrude is Gertrude is Gertrude

“To a great mind, nothing is little,' remarked Holmes, sententiously.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

“Genius thinks out of box when leader adjusts the size of box.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Genius: Range of mind, power of imagination, and responsiveness of soul: this is genius. The man of genius has a soul with greater range, can therefore be struck by the feelings of all beings, is concerned with everything in nature, and never receives an idea that does not evoke a feeling. Everything stirs him and everything is retained within him.
When the soul has been moved by an object itself, it is even more affected by the memory of the object. But in a man of genius imagination goes further: it recalls ideas with a more vivid feeling than it received them, because to these ideas are connected a thousand others more appropriate to arouse the feeling.”
― Jean-François de Saint-Lambert

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“What you seek is seeking you.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled.
There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled.
You feel it, don't you?”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“I know you're tired but come, this is the way.”
― Jalalu'l-din Rumi

“Beauty surrounds us.”
― Rumi