“Genius is only childhood recovered at will, childhood now gifted to express itself with the faculties of manhood and with the analytic mind that allows him to give order to the heap of unwittingly hoarded material.”
Le génie n'est que l'enfance retrouvée à volonté, l'enfance douée maintenant, pour s'exprimer, d'organes virils et de l'esprit analytique qui lui permet d'ordonner la somme de matériaux involontairement amassée.
III: "L'artiste, homme du monde, homme des foules et enfant" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/L%E2%80%99Artiste%2C_homme_du_monde%2C_homme_des_foules_et_enfant
Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863)
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Le génie n'est que l'enfance retrouvée à volonté, l'enfance douée maintenant, pour s'exprimer, d'organes virils et de l'esprit analytique qui lui permet d'ordonner la somme de matériaux involontairement amassée.
Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863)
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Charles Baudelaire 133
French poet 1821–1867Related quotes
Source: My Family and Other Animals
“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”
“Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.”
“Love makes its record in deeper colors as we grow out of childhood into manhood”
Table-Talk (1857)
Context: Love makes its record in deeper colors as we grow out of childhood into manhood; as the Emperors signed their names in green ink when under age, but when of age, in purple.
“Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.”
The New York Times, March 1, 1981. http://partners.nytimes.com/books/98/11/29/specials/bainbridge-tenth.html
Source: A Letter to a Hindu (1908), VI
Context: What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time.
“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.”
Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863), III: “L’artiste, homme du monde, homme des foules et enfant”
Variant: Genius is nothing but youth recaptured.
Source: The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 8. Of the Ancient Practice of Painting
Context: When all others had succumbed to the fascinations of corporal decoration, the Priests and the Women alone still remained pure from the pollution of paint.
Immoral, licentious, anarchical, unscientific — call them by what names you will — yet, from an aesthetic point of view, those ancient days of the Colour Revolt were the glorious childhood of Art in Flatland — a childhood, alas, that never ripened into manhood, nor even reached the blossom of youth. To live was then in itself a delight, because living implied seeing.