Gertrude Atherton Quotes

Genius is initiative on fire.

Genius is always impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes it hard to train.

All the means of action -- the shapeless masses -- the materials -- lie everywhere about us. What we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into the transparent crystal, bright and clear. That fire is genius.

Intellect is a fire; rash and pitiless it melts this wonderful bone-house which is called man. Genius even, as it is the greatestgood, is the greatest harm.

when you think you've got hold of a genius ... you can't be sure whether it's a spark of the divine fire or a mere flash in the pan.

Truth is the nursing mother of genius.

As a writer, politician, scientist, and businessman, [Ben] Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day-though he left school at ten. (...)Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.

Poverty is the step-mother of genius.

The thing that started me painting originally was seeing Bambi when I was about nine. I was incredibly disturbed by the forest fire that killed Bambi's mother, and that distress gave me the impulse to create something, as a way of dealing with it.

Genius is the father of a heavenly line, but the mortal mother, that is industry.

Truth is the nursing mother of genius. No man can be absolutely true to himself, eschewing cant, compromise, servile imitation, and complaisance without becoming original.

As I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs.

I hate everything approaching temperamental inspiration,'sacred fire'and all those attributes of genius which serve only as cloaks for untidy minds.

I consider myself a genius because, when you talk about anything and everything, you a genius to me. It's just about makin' it fire on top o' more fire.

What good is it to have a belly if there's no fire in it? Wake up, drink your passion, light a match and get to work.

And yes, again, that was it exactly. A retyper and not a writer. A prodigy and not a genius.

The true genius shudders at incompleteness.

Neither had Watt of the Steam engine a heroic origin, any kindred with the princes of this world. The princes of this world were shooting their partridges... While this man with blackened fingers, with grim brow, was searching out, in his workshop, the Fire-secret.

No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game

The one mistake which is committed habitually by people who have the gift of half-genius, is waiting for inspiration.

Intelligence is not creative; judgment is not creative. If a sculptor is nothing but skill and mind, his hands will be without genius.

The person of old had the same brilliance of mind that we assume we have now. But that which made a thing become manifest for the first time is our great moment of creative happening.

Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire.

The degree of genius necessary to please us is pretty nearly the same proportion that we ourselves have.