John Ruskin Quotes

Of course creativity is a mystery. We don't know what drives it or what constitutes it. It's one of those things, like genius, you know it when you see it but it's impossible to define.

Upper berth, lower berth, that's the difference between talent and genius.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

I have never been an innovator, a creative genius.

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

Genius, particularly creative genius, is less about raw intelligence and more about elevated vision.

When you're a kid, and someone's an artist, you think of Leonardo da Vinci. You don't think that's a job; you just think of a man with a beard, painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

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.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers.

This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.

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

Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

Genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies and animates.

Theories of genius are the peculiar constructions of our own philosophical times; ages of genius had passed away, and they left no other record than their works; no preconcerted theory described the workings of the imagination to be without imagination, nor did they venture to teach how to invent invention.

What has been done in the world - the works of genius - cost nothing. There is no painful effort, but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. Shakespeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest.

When the spirit of child's play enters into the creative process, it's a wonderful force and something to be nurtured.

Anything imagined can be made real ... given sufficient genius.

Indeed, the great Leonardo (da Vinci) remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one way. It is said that all great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries.

A child sees everything in a sense of newness - he is always drunk. Genius is nothing but childhood re-attained at will.

To carry feelings of childhood into the powers of adulthood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish it from talent.

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

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

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

Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.

Nature is the armory of genius. Cities serve it poorly, books and colleges at second hand; the eye craves the spectacle of the horizon; of mountain, ocean, river and plain, the clouds and stars; actual contact with the elements, sympathy with the seasons as they rise and roll.