A Quote by George Eliot

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

George Eliot

Quote Topics

Capacity Discipline First Genius Great Little More Receiving Than

Quote Author

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

Genius is the capacity for receiving and improving by 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

Criticism is as often a trade as a science, requiring, as it does, more health than wit, more labour than capacity, more practice than genius.

Jean de la Bruyere

These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.

Michael Cunningham

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

I think a good deal may be said to extenuate the fault of bad Poets. What we call a Genius, is hard to be distinguish'd by a man himself, from a strong inclination: and if his genius be ever so great, he can not at first discover it any other way, than by giving way to that prevalent propensity which renders him the more liable to be mistaken.

Alexander Pope

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

The more love we give away, the more we have left. The laws of love differ from the laws of arithmetic. Love hoarded dwindles, but love given grows. If we give all our love, we will have more left than they who save some. Giving love, not receiving, is important; but when we give with no thought of receiving, we automatically, and inescapably receive abundantly. Heaven is a by-product of love. When we say, "I love you," we mean that "a little of God's love flows from me to you." Thereby, we do not have less, but more. For in flowing, the quantity is magnified.

John Templeton

Listening is more important than anything else because that's what music is. Somebody is playing something and you're receiving it. It is sending and receiving.

Carla Bley

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

There is sometimes a greater judgement shewn in deviating from the rules of art, than in adhering to them; and?there ismore beauty inthe works of a great genius who is ignorant of all the rules of art, than in the works of a little genius, who not only knows but scrupulously observes them.

Joseph Addison

Nothing can be more hurtful to the service, than the neglect of discipline; for that discipline, more than numbers, gives one army the superiority over another.

George Washington

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by friction.

Heinrich Heine

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but less by assimilation than by friction.

Heinrich Heine

The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets. Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second.