Sri Aurobindo Quotes

In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

People have laughed at all great inventors and discoverers.

Knowledge comes from the past, so it's safe. It is also out of date. It's the opposite of originality... Experience is the opposite of being creative.

It's not that complicated. If you hear something and it makes you want to hear it again, that's the ticket. You have to be lucky enough to find geniuses, welcome them and get out of their way.

Since when was genius found respectable?

Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.

... the genius never makes anything new, but always something that is just different, and the average talents provide him the possibility within which his genius condenses into achievements.

Captivating the spirit of the age is a matter of great talent; being swept away by it characterizes an average mind. The two are as different from one another as activity and passivity.

Talent shuffles the deck. Genius brings a new deck.

The day we stop exploring is the day we commit ourselves to live in a stagnant world, devoid of curiosity, empty of dreams.

Too often we forget that genius, too, depends upon the data within its reach, that even Archimedes could not have devised Edison's inventions.

Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds.

No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.

Genius resembles a bell; in order to ring it must be suspended into pure air, and when a foreign body touches it, its joyful toneis silenced.

Genius is talent provided with ideals. Genius starves while talent wears purple and fine linen. The man of genius of today will infifty years' time be in most cases no more than a man of talent.

Genius is what makes us forget the master's talent.

If a man's got talent and guts to buck society, he's obviously above average. You want to hold on to him. You straighten him out and turn him into a plus value. Why throw him away? Do that enough and all you've got left are the sheep.

Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented.

But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.

If a piece of genius comes, it comes, and it if doesn't, it doesn't.

Talent warms-up the given (as they say in cookery) and makes it apparent; genius brings something new. But our time lets talent pass for genius. They want to abolish the genius, deify the genius, and let talent forge ahead.

Talent jogs to conclusions to which Genius takes giant leaps.

Genius is personal, decided by fate, but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.