Top 1200 Artistic Genius Quotes & Sayings

Preserve my artistic creativity and ennoble my artistic fame.

The essential in artistic creativity is victory over the burden of necessity. In art, man lives outside himself, outside his burdens, the burdens of life. Every creative artistic act is a partial transfiguration of life. In the artistic concept man breaks out through the heaviness of the world. In the creative-artistic attitude towards this world we catch a glimpse of another world.

The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.

I don't like that word 'discovery.' ... Sinatra was the first one to call Ray Charles a genius, he spoke of 'the genius of Ray Charles.' And after that everybody called him a genius. They didn't call him a genius before that though. He was a genius but they didn't call him that. ... If a white man hadn't told them, they wouldn't've seen it. ... Like, you know, they say Columbus discovered America, he didn't discover America.

It should be quite clear that it is possible for unpleasant people who are small in various ways other than in their artistic genius to produce great art. Art and morality have no necessary connection.

In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought.

Well, I was always cast as an artistic homicidal maniac. But at least I was artistic!

Oh, I'm not a true genius. I'm a near genius. I would say I'm a short genius. I'd rather be tall and normal than a short genius.

It is characteristic of genius to be hopeful and aspiring. It is characteristic of genius to break up the artificial arrangements of conventionalism, and to view mankind in true perspective, in their gradations of inherent rather than of adventitious worth. Genius is therefore essentially democratic, and has always been so.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Talk not of genius baffled. Genius is master of man. Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.

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.

In the commercial theater, I've been pretty fortunate. The producers that I've worked with have allowed me to define the artistic integrity, the artistic limits of the work.

There's a really fine line between artistic license and artistic licentiousness. And history is a lousy filmmaker. It doesn't give you all the ingredients you need. No story will quite fulfill that three-act structure.

Calvin: I'm a genius, but I'm a misunderstood genius. Hobbes: What's misunderstood about you? Calvin: Nobody thinks I'm a genius. Corfu? It's just a poor man's Pensacola.

Either I'm a genius or I'm mad, which is it? "No," I said, "I can't be mad because nobody's put me away; therefore I'm a genius." Genius is a form of madness and we're all that way. But I used to be coy about it, like me guitar playing. But if there's such a thing as genius - I am one. And if there isn't, I don't care.

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

I’m the archetype of a disabled genius, or should I say a physically challenged genius, to be politically correct. At least I’m obviously physically challenged. Whether I’m a genius is more open to doubt.

A genius who does not know that he is a genius is no genius.

My mother was an artist, and I was fairly good at art as a child. I was always the best drawer in class, except in second grade when an artistic genius passed through our school!

The Man of Genius may at the same time be, indeed is commonly, an Artist, but the two are not to be confounded. The Man of Genius,referred to mankind, is an originator, an inspired or demonic man, who produces a perfect work in obedience to laws yet unexplored. The artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected. There has been no man of pure Genius, as there has been none wholly destitute of Genius.

To vest a few fallible men — prosecutors, judges, jurors — with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J. S. Mill called a "moral police," is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products. If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do likewise to a work of genius.

Nina Simone is a musical genius and a rich and precious treasure who paid a heavy price for her artistic freedom.

I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?

THE SUFFERING OF GENIUS AND ITS VALUE. The artistic genius desires to give pleasure, but if his mind is on a very high plane he does not easily find anyone to share his pleasure; he offers entertainment but nobody accepts it. That gives him, in certain circumstances, a comically touching pathos; for he has no right to force pleasure on men. He pipes, but none will dance: can that be tragic?

The mathematician's best work is art, a high perfect art, as daring as the most secret dreams of imagination, clear and limpid. Mathematical genius and artistic genius touch one another.

There were some great clinicians in the 20th century - great men. Freud was a genius; Jung was a genius, Carl Rogers was a genius - there's a half-dozen psychologists of the 1950s and humanists of the 1960s.

In Oakland, Al Davis was a genius. We had Ron Wolff there, too, and he was a genius. There was no room for me to be a genius.

Artistic judgments are silly if expressed as dogmas, at least until we get an "artometer" which can measure objectively how many micro-michelangelos or kilo-homers of genius a given artifact has in it.

I'm not interested in artistic records for the sake of making artistic records where they're so cool no one listens to them.

Genius is the basis for the deepest type of mentoring. When true learning occurs genius teaches genius and both the teacher and the student grow.

Genius is by definition a style of consciousness characterized by the ability to access high energy attractor patterns. It is not a personality characteristic. It is not something that a person has, nor even something that someone is. Those in whom we recognize genius commonly disclaim it. A universal characteristic of genius is humility. The genius has always attributed his insights to some higher influence.

The best minds come from the most unexpected faces and places. There is no image for intelligence or genius. Genius is something that cannot be seen. It cannot be produced or manufactured. It is something that even the true genius thinks is unattainable. The genius recognizes he’s just a small pea in a sea of infinite atoms. Knowledge is as infinite as the universe. The man who claims to know all, only reveals to all that he really knows nothing.

I regret that I must so continually use the word genius, as if that should apply only to a caste as well defined from those below as income-tax payers are from the untaxed. The word genius was very probably invented by a man who had small claims on it himself; greater men would have understood better what to be a genius really was, and probably they would have come to see that the word could be applied to most people. Goethe said that perhaps only a genius is able to understand a genius.

It is not because the touch of genius has roused genius to production, but because the admiration of genius has made talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant.

What is an artistic picture? An artistic picture is very simple. The creator is not the producer. The creator is not the star. The creator is the director, the person who realizes the picture, like a poet, like an artist. The creator of the picture is free to do whatever he wants, how he wants to do it. That is an artistic picture.

Genius, throughout history, has been found difficult to classify because it varies in amount: It's rare to find a genius in the context of the noun, but most people, if not all, have a bit of genius in them in the context of the adjective.

Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system.

What I like about teaching is the discipline of finding words to unpack the artistic process. And I admire the drive in students who want to write, the mystery of how artistic talent unfolds.

The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.

Genius is talent provided with ideals. Genius starves while talent wears purple and fine linen. The man of genius of today will infifty years' time be in most cases no more than a man of talent.

Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.

It's harder to be a success, globally, and be artistic. Harder to have that balance than just to be artistic when nobody understands you.

Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.

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.

Mandelstam was an artistic genius, the sort that any century produces only a handful of.

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

It was a particularly interesting and exciting time, and the European political and artistic establishment was turned on by the Civil Rights Movement and the artistic revolution that was becoming a part of jazz.

The iPhone will forever be associated with the inventive genius of Steve Jobs and Silicon Valley. But the roots of innovation can be traced back - from one genius to another, at least - back to the genius who put the phone in iPhone: Alexander Graham Bell.

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.

Designers are more like artistic directors now. Before, there wasn't this idea of supervising the artistic direction of the entire house. The old way was to think you could be this couturier or designer or stylist.

Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.

Men of genius are far more abundant than is supposed. In fact, to appreciate thoroughly the work of what we call genius, is to possess all the genius by which the work was produced.

The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] the good musician, and the immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason.

The great genius does not let his work be determined by the concrete finite conditions that surround him, whilst it is from these that the work of the statesman takes its direction and its termination. ... It is the genius in reality and not the other who is the creator of history, for it is only the genius who is outside and unconditioned by history.

Governmental aid is a drawback rather than an assistance, as, although it may facilitate in the routine of artistic production, it is an impediment to the development of true artistic genius.

The genius is the man who has genuine and deep human relations with others, who does not cut himself off in the search for originality, but who realizes the value of artistic tradition.

I wasn't artistic in drawing or painting, but I think I am artistic in sport. I think I'm always looking for the ultimate, the maximum. It's a challenge that excites me.

You've got to stick up for what you believe in. If you don't do that, you're doing a disservice to the audience, because you're making something really diluted. And if you do that when you're a guy, you're seen as artistic - 'difficulty' is seen as a sign of genius. But it's not the same for women.

I firmly believe in and support everyone's right to freedom of artistic expression. STEEL MAGNOLIAS is my artistic expression, and it is my right to say that its female characters be portrayed by women. The concept of a play set in a beauty parlor where men portray women is a terrific idea. If that is someone's artistic expression, I encourage them to write their own play as soon as possible.