Mary Hunter Austin Quotes

Inspiration and genius -one and the same.

Talent works, genius creates.

What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?

Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

And doing so you can recreate yourself and you can also come up with something that is not only original and creative and artistic, but also maybe even decent, or moral if I can use words like that, or something that's like basically good.

Is it not in the most absolute simplicity that real genius plies its pinions the most wonderfully?

You have certain writing tools but generally creating something from nothing makes one quite mad and Cynthia and I are quite mad you know.

I have never been an innovator, a creative genius.

All genius is a conquering of chaos and mystery.

The lamp of genius burns quicker than the lamp of life.

Genius is gifted with a vitality which is expended in the enrichment of life through the discovery of new worlds of feeling.

Men of genius are like eagles, they live on what they kill, while men of talents are like crows, they live on what has been killed for them.

A genius is a man who has two great ideas.

the distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and uses; genius combines and creates.

Giving calls for genius.

Talent is full of thoughts, Genius is thought. Talent is a cistern, Genius a fountain.

Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.

Genius is that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates.

The Man of Genius may at the same time be, indeed is commonly, an Artist, but the two are not to be confounded. The Man of Genius,referred to mankind, is an originator, an inspired or demonic man, who produces a perfect work in obedience to laws yet unexplored. The artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected. There has been no man of pure Genius, as there has been none wholly destitute of Genius.

Talent is the ability to say things well, but genius is the ability to, well, say things.