“Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life?”
1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Experience
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Ralph Waldo Emerson 727
American philosopher, essayist, and poet 1803–1882Related quotes

“I had no distance or detachment from what I read: it seemed too real to me, too possible.”
Apocalypse Descending (2002)
Context: I was about ten when I first read 1984 and Lord of the Flies, both of which absolutely terrified me — especially 1984, because I figured out that Julia, Winston Smith's lover, would have been born the same year I was. I knew these books were fiction, but I was far too young to have a grasp on the political or cultural realities behind them — I had no distance or detachment from what I read: it seemed too real to me, too possible.

Source: Intimacy: das Buch zum Film von Patrice Chéreau

“The dead, too, are like this, blazing within us — invisibly.”
As quoted in No More Words : A Journal of My Mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (2001) by Reeve Lindbergh, p. 41
Context: So dazzling was the spread of constellations that it had the impact of a vision, of some hidden insight. I drove home saying to myself: The dead, too, are like this, blazing within us — invisibly.

As quoted in "Miranda July Is Totally Not Kidding" by Katrina Onstad, in The New York Times (14 July 2011)

“If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it.”

“Despair and Genius are too oft connected”
Source: Byron Poems