“Common sense is as rare as genius.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
“Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.”
The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)
Context: Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes. But those who have had ample opportunities of intimately knowing the growth of works in the minds of artists, will bear me out in saying that a vivid memory supplies the elements from a thousand different sources, most of which are quite beyond the power of localisation, the experience of yesterday being strangely intermingled with the dim suggestions of early years, the tones heard in childhood sounding through the diapason of sorrowing maturity; and all these kaleidoscopic fragments are recomposed into images that seem to have a corresponding reality of their own.
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George Henry Lewes54
British philosopher 1817–1878Related quotes
“The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between the World and Me
Source: Between the World and Me (2015), p. 9.
Context: Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed.... The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.
“But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as”
Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist
Source: The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, Chapter VIII, p. 80.
Context: We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of the workman. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist
Source: Magical and Philosophical Commentaries on The Book of the Law
David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Lloyd George is portrayed as saying this, as George Nathaniel Curzon was making a complaint against Raymond Poincaré in the Turkish TV series, Kurtuluş (1994), but no prior citation of such a statement has yet been found.
Misattributed
John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer
Page 35.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)