“Too often we forget that genius, too, depends upon the data within its reach, that even Archimedes could not have devised Edison's inventions. We also forget that genius is not genius all the time, although it is superior all the time.”

Source: The Art of Thinking (1928), p. 169

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Too often we forget that genius, too, depends upon the data within its reach, that even Archimedes could not have devis…" by Ernest Dimnet?
Ernest Dimnet photo
Ernest Dimnet 17
French writer 1866–1954

Related quotes

Saul Bellow photo

“We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.”

Herzog (1964) [Penguin Classics, 2003, ISBN 0-142-43729-8], p. 82
General sources

Joan Didion photo
Joshua Reynolds photo

“Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.”

Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) English painter, specialising in portraits

Discourse no. 3; vol. 1, p. 57.
Discourses on Art

José Maria Eça de Queiroz photo

“In general, we Portuguese only begin to be idiotic when we reach the age of reason. While we are young we all have a spark of genius.”

Em geral, nós outros, os Portugueses, só começamos a ser idiotas – quando chegamos à idade da razão. Em pequenos temos todos uma pontinha de génio.
"A Literatura de Natal"; "Christmas Literature" p. 42.
Cartas de Inglaterra (1879–82)

Eugene J. Martin photo

“Genius does not only require superior knowledge and skill, but also superior patience.”

Eugene J. Martin (1938–2005) American artist

Annotated Drawings by Eugene J. Martin: 1977-1978

Oscar Wilde photo
Georges Sorel photo

“Mussolini is a man no less extraordinary than Lenin. He, too, is a political genius, of a greater reach than all the statesmen of the day, with the only exception of Lenin…”

Georges Sorel (1847–1922) French philosopher and sociologist

As quoted in The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the 20th Century, Jacob L. Talmon, University of California Press (1981) p. 451. Sorel’s March 1921 conversations with Jean Variot, published in Variot’s Propos de Georges Sorel, (1935) Paris, pp. 53-57, 66-86 passim

George Gordon Byron photo

“Despair and Genius are too oft connected”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Source: Byron Poems

Bertrand Russell photo

“In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 2: The Place of Science in a Liberal Education

Related topics