Robert Schumann Quotes

There's a stark difference between the words 'prodigy' and 'genius.' Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured out; geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered. Prodigies learn; geniuses do.

Genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow.

This is the nature of genius, to be able to grasp the knowable even when no one else recognizes that it is present.

Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it's that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through-originality.

Genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

For what we are about to see next, we must enter quietly into the realm of genius!

I'm interested in genius the way a hungry man is interested in Philadelphia cheesesteaks. I want something. I want a piece of it.

Genius speaks only to genius.

... Geniuses have a little extra something. There's that little something that you know is a little different.

You can do something with talent, but nothing with genius.

Genius is its own end.

No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

Genius in one grand particular is like life. We know nothing of either but by their effects.

Genius declares itself to be a kind of higher masculinity.

Genius is the accumulated wealth of our humanity--its most intense development concentrated at one point, and then with clearer expression and with mysterious power shot back to us across the galvanic lines of thought and feeling.

Genius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path of fire for its vivid power.

Works of genius are the first things in the world.

Genius is not a single power, but a combination of great powers. It reasons, but it is not reasoning; it judges, but it is not judgment; imagines, but it is not imagination; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not passion. It is neither, because it is all.

Never imitate the eccentricities of genius, but toil after it in its truer flights. They are not so easy to follow, but they lead to higher regions.

The big characters who occupy science, especially modern science, are all "off" in fundamental ways. I don't think that genius goes hand in hand with being socially inept or being a sociopath or being a misanthrope, but I do think that it is a mind that can think so differently - so beyond how one is supposed to think. I wanted to pay tribute to that mind.

The great genius does not let his work be determined by the concrete finite conditions that surround him, whilst it is from these that the work of the statesman takes its direction and its termination. ... It is the genius in reality and not the other who is the creator of history, for it is only the genius who is outside and unconditioned by history.

True genius does not fulfill expectations; true genius shatters it.

There has never been any great genius without a spice of madness.

Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.