A Quote by Babette Deutsch

Poetry is the fiery index to the genius of the age.

Babette Deutsch

Quote Topics

Age Fiery Genius Poetry Poetry Is

Quote Author

Babette Deutsch
American - Novelist
September 22, 1895 - November 13, 1982

Genius is its own reward; for the best that one is, one must necessarily be for oneself. . . . Further, genius consists in the working of the free intellect., and as a consequence the productions of genius serve no useful purpose. The work of genius may be music, philosophy, painting, or poetry; it is nothing for use or profit. To be useless and unprofitable is one of the characteristics of genius; it is their patent of nobility.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry - and we have Shakespeare.

Matthew Arnold

Genius is a steed too fiery for the plow or the cart.

Henry Ward Beecher

The rank of a university is similar to an index number say like the NASDAQ index. I don't understand how you can take an institution like Harvard, Stanford, or Michigan, and represent it by an index number. The concept makes no sense.

Henry Rosovsky

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

Nadine Gordimer

To clothe the fiery thought In simple words succeeds, For still the craft of genius is To mask a king in weeds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I used to hold a fiery wind and I tried to determine the direction where poetry would fly.

Alda Merini

Neither can we admit that definition of genius that some would propose--"a power to accomplish all that we undertake;" for we might multiply examples to prove that this definition of genius contains more than the thing defined. Cicero failed in poetry, Pope in painting, Addison in oratory; yet it would be harsh to deny genius to these men.

Charles Caleb Colton

The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet, and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius.

Harold Rosenberg

Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. The genius is a man who knows everything without having learned it.

Otto Weininger

My own motivation has come from the fact that all the indicators in the world, the hunger index or whatever index you say, shows a high prevalence of malnutrition.

M. S. Swaminathan

I like to do matrices. One option per line, different facets for each column. Salary, location, happiness index, failure index, and all that.

Marissa Mayer

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

Damon Galgut

Poetry of all the forms of literature I think is the most suited for the digital age and for the shorter attention spans and all of that. It Twitters very easily, some lyric poems and it's very easy to zip a poem to someone, so that's one of the things I think is wonderful about poetry in the digital age.