“Such is the vastness of his genius that he can outwit even himself.”
Steven Erikson book Deadhouse Gates
Source: Deadhouse Gates
translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in original Dutch / citaat van Jacob Maris, in het Nederlands: Thijs wist alles uit zich zelf, hij was een genie.
Quote of Jacob Maris about his brother Matthijs Maris, in a talk with G. H. Marius in: De Hollandsche Schilderkunst in de 19e eeuw, G. H. Marius; Martinus Nijhoff, s-Gravenhage, 1903/1920, p. 144
Variant: A painting is finished when one can see what it represents. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)
“Such is the vastness of his genius that he can outwit even himself.”
Steven Erikson book Deadhouse Gates
Source: Deadhouse Gates
Zinedine Zidane (1972) French association football player and manager
Marcello Lippi, September 2011 http://www.espnstar.com/football/serie-a/news/detail/item683056/%22Zidane-is-greatest-football-player%22/
Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist
Source: Epigrams, p. 345
Honoré de Balzac book Une fille d'Ève
L'homme qui peut empreindre perpétuellement la pensée dans le fait est un homme de génie; mais l'homme qui a le plus de génie ne le déploie pas à tous les instants, il ressemblerait trop à Dieu.
Source: A Daughter of Eve (1839), Ch. 3: The Story of a Happy Woman.
Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist
Part 2, Book 1, Ch. 2
Ninety-Three (1874)
Context: Cimourdain was one of those men who have a voice within them, and who listen to it. Such men seem absent-minded; they are not; they are all attention.
Cimourdain knew everything and nothing. He knew everything about science, and nothing at all about life. Hence his inflexibility. His eyes were bandaged like Homer's Themis. He had the blind certainty of the arrow, which sees only the mark and flies to it. In a revolution, nothing is more terrible than a straight line. Cimourdain went straight ahead, as sure as fate.
Cimourdain believed that, in social geneses, the extreme point is the solid earth; an error peculiar to minds which replace reason with logic.
Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician
On Benjamin Disraeli, in his own book, Debts of Honour
1980s
“She knew nothing but she had everything he had lost.”
Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray