“To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius.”
Joyce Cary (1888–1957) Irish writer
“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
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Ernest Dimnet17
French writer 1866–1954Related quotes
“We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.”
Saul Bellow book Herzog
Herzog (1964) [Penguin Classics, 2003, ISBN 0-142-43729-8], p. 82
General sources
“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 book Cartas de Inglaterra
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)
“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
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
“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 (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