Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride as if it were our home, which it is. Why then should we take less pride when reading a book written by some long-dead author? Is it not our book just as much, or even more so, than theirs? So the landowner says, __ook at my beautiful home! Isn__ it fine?_ And not, __ook at the home so-and-so has built._ Thus we shouldn__ cry, __ook what so-and-so has written. What a genius so-and-so is!_ But rather, __ook at what I have read! Am I not a genius? Have I not invented these pages? The walls of this universe, did I not build? The souls of these characters, did I not weave?
Genius, as we tend to talk about it today, is some sort of mysterious and combustible substance that burns brightly and burns out. It's the strange gift of poets and pop stars that allows them to produce one wonderful work in their early twenties and then nothing. It is mysterious. It is there. It is gone.
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Genius, as we tend to talk about it today, is some sort of mysterious and combustible substance that burns brightly and burns out. It's the strange gift of poets and pop stars that allows them to produce one wonderful work in their early twenties and then nothing. It is mysterious. It is there. It is gone.
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Genius is a sovereign power; it forms schools; it lays hold on the spirits of men, with irresistible might; and it exercises an immeasurable influence on the whole condition of human life. This sovereignty of genius is a gift of God, possessed only by his grace. It is subject to no one and is responsible to him alone who has granted it this ascendancy.
...bow to genius, but to the authority of that genius - not the display of talent...
Sometimes she arches away from me and wears a light halo of genius about her.
The only choice once your world has been torn apart is to find your genius and live with that. __ormal_ is out of the question. The healing for veterans, or anyone going through great tragedy, is finding your natural spirit and your genius that was waiting to be found. That can now become the cohering principle in your life. The idea of patching someone up and back into normal when they__e had extremely abnormal experiences is a misunderstanding.
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!