Erwin Chargaff Quotes

If you stick with a vision, it might not all work, but some of it will be absolute genius. To me, 15 minutes worth of absolute genius in a film is so much better than two hours of mediocrity. I would rather pay to see something different like that.

Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.

Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe.

Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.

Once genius is submerged by bureaucracy, a nation is doomed to mediocrity..

Most people don't find their creativity. There are more unsung geniuses that don't even know they have great talent.

The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.

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.

While legislation can stimulate and encourage, the real creative ability which builds up and develops the country, and in general makes human existence more tolerable and life more complete, has to be supplied by the genius of the people themselves. The Government can supply no substitute for enterprise.

Genius, like a thunderstorm, comes up against the wind.

One must indeed be ignorant of the methods of genius to suppose that it allows itself to be cramped by forms. Forms are for mediocrity, and it is fortunate that mediocrity can act only according to routine. Ability takes its flight unhindered.

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

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius, the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars.

Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes.

We have barely begun to tap into the genius of our humanity.

We took nothing from anybody. We gave a great deal to the world. The only thing keeping us alive is our brilliance. The only thing that keeps our brilliance alive is our patents.

Pure logic could never lead us to anything but tautologies; it can create nothing new; not from it alone can any science issue.

True originality has its foundations in the soul, not in the mind, and when there is an effort to create something different it is usually a failure. Beethoven or Schumann or Chopin did not try to be original. They were original.

For without invention, no one was ever a great man in his own trade.

Genius is intellect constructive.

Peer reviewers go for orthodoxy ... Many of the great 19th-century discoveries were made by men who had independent wealth-Charles Darwin is the prototype. They trusted themselves.

Men of genius are meteors destined to burn themselves out in lighting up their age.

To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.

You have to be able to make a real creative life for Yourself, before you can expect anyone Else to provide one ready-made for you.

The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.