Victor Hugo Quotes

Genius is sorrow's child.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself.

Passion is like genius: a miracle.

Despair and Genius are too oft connected

A genius is somebody who seemingly just reaches out of nowhere.

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

Of the three prerequisites of genius; the first is soul; the second is soul; and the third is soul.

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.

Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.

It is only occasional that talent becomes genius - radiating sparks, brilliance, energy, and charismatic magnetism... such a talent was Janis Joplin.

Genius has to pass over madness and madness over genius

Talent shuffles the deck. Genius brings a new deck.

A genius is a man who has two great ideas.

Genius is the true mystery, and at its edge--the abyss.

You can't have a masterpiece without madness.

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

Incredible brilliance often dwells on the razor's edge of madness.

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.

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 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.

Giving calls for genius.

I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.