A Quote by George Eliot

Genius is the capacity for receiving and improving by discipline.

George Eliot

Quote Topics

Capacity Discipline Genius Improving Receiving

Quote Author

George Eliot
British - Novelist
November 22, 1819 - December 22, 1880

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

George Eliot

The Criteria of Emotional Maturity: The ability to deal constructively with reality The capacity to adapt to change A relative freedom from symptoms that are produced by tensions and anxieties The capacity to find more satisfaction in giving than receiving The capacity to relate to other people in a consistent manner with mutual satisfaction and helpfulness The capacity to sublimate, to direct one's instinctive hostile energy into creative and constructive outlets The capacity to love.

William C. Menninger

To be free people we must assume total responsibility for ourselves, but in doing so must possess the capacity to reject responsibility that is not truly ours. To be organized and efficient, to live wisely, we must daily delay gratification and keep an eye on the future; yet to live joyously we must also possess the capacity, when it is not destructive, to live in the present and act spontaneously. In other words, discipline itself must be disciplined. The type of discipline required to discipline discipline is what I call balancing.

M. Scott Peck

Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.

William Saroyan

Buffett’s genius was largely a genius of character—of patience, discipline, and rationality.

Roger Lowenstein

Talent is able to achieve what is beyond other people's capacity to achieve, yet not what is beyond their capacity of apprehension; therefore it at once finds its appreciators. The achievement of genius, on the other hand, transcends not only others' capacity of achievement, but also their capacity of apprehension; therefore they do not become immediately aware of it. Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target, as far as which others cannot even see.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The only difference between a genius and one of common capacity is that the former anticipates and explores what the latter accidentally hits upon; but even the man of genius himself more frequently employs the advantages that chance presents to him.

Guillaume Thomas Francois Raynal

Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.

William Hazlitt

You've really got to keep on improving and improving and improving. It still involves work. It's not like you get to a point, and then you're good and that's it.

Patty Schemel

Eventually, meditation will make our mind calm, clear, and as concentrated as a laser which we can focus at will. This capacity of one-pointed attention is the essence of genius. When we have this mastery over attention in everything we do, we have a genius for life.

Eknath Easwaran

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

I have seen so much obstructed potential among people who lack personal discipline, who just slough it off, whatever it is, and who think that nothing matters very much. I want my daughter to have what I think of as a capacity for self-discipline. Not the sort of self-discipline that diminishes her own wild passions, but that makes it safer for her to own those wild passions.

Marianne Williamson

There is only one sort of discipline - PERFECT DISCIPLINE. Men cannot have good battle discipline and poor administrative discipline.

George S. Patton

Everybody is born with the capacity to enjoy, but not with the art. People think just because they are alive and they breathe and they exist, they know how to enjoy. That is sheer stupidity. Enjoyment is a great art, it is a great discipline. It is as subtle a discipline as music or poetry or painting. It is the greatest creativity.

Rajneesh

In science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it. ... In art nothing worth doing can be done without genius; in science even a very moderate capacity can contribute to a supreme achievement.