Towering genius...thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freeman.
Mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings - this and nothing else is the task... for the question is this : How can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? Only by living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens.
The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.
Seldom can philosophic genius be more usefully employed than in thus rescuing admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.
We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies and peddlars.
We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, andfind a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, "the italics are ours.
The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity of the dissimilar.