". . . talent is like a marksman who hits a target that others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target . . . others cannot even see." --Schopenhauer.
". . . it is the characteristic of genius always to be stimulating other men's genius." Goethe, Shakespeare ad infinitum.
"Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos. Before a brilliant person begins something great, they must look foolish to the crowd."-- I Ching
"'There are a few men who are not dupes of ignorance,' said Hermes to Charon, but 'you see how they stand aloof from the crowd and laugh at what goes on; they are not in the least satisfied with it all, but are cleverly planning to make their escape from life to your own regions. Indeed they have reason, for they are disliked because they expose the follies of men.'" --Lucian, Charon, Or The Inspectors.
"The world is a welter and always has been one; but through all the cranks and the theorists cannot master the old floundering monster, or force it for long into any of their neat plans of readjustment, here and there a saint or a genius suddenly sends a little ray through the fog, and helps humanity to stumble on, and perhaps up." --Edith Wharton, Looking Backward
"[Nietzsche] must have known that the book [Birth of Tragedy] would ruin his career in scholarship and make his life in Basel very difficult . . .[H]is anxiety over alienating himself from his profession was largely balanced by the pleasure he now anticipated from Wagner's approval . [I]t required Wagner, who was a recognized genius, to name Nietzsche one. . . . the objective knowledge that the genius has of the [Platonic] Ideas is not directly relevant to day-to-day life. His direct apprehension of the nature of things gives his knowledge a timeless quality incompatible with the strivings of his contemporaries, who are so full of momentary purpose. His very insight estranges him from his fellows." Carl Pletsch, Young Nietzsche- Becoming a Genius.
"I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was nay general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three genius of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead. . . .I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it . . . . I remember once coming into the room and hearing Bernard Faÿ say that the three people of first rate importance that he had met in his life were Picasso, Gertrude Stein and Andre Gidé and Gertrude Stein inquired quite simply, that is quite right but why include Gidé." Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Tolkas.
"[Walter] Pater's accomplishment was in no way due to what we call genius, but to perfected talent--was indeed a classical example of such a talent, created by almost infinite artifice and pains. It was talent, moreover, for writing prose; and with my delight in the beauty of English prose,--the 'fine writing' as it is derisively called, of our older authors,--I welcomed his declaration that to limit prose to mere lucidity was no more than a narrow and puritanical restriction. It was and could be, an instrument of many stops, musical, picturesque, intimate and fervid; and thus conceived, it was the appropriate and most promising medium for the rendering of modern life." Logan Pearsall Smith, Unforgotten Years
"But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid upon the poor aspirant to poetry; for it is hinted he should have been born two centuries ago, inasmuch as poetry about that date vanished from the earth and became no more attainable by men! Such cobweb speculations have, now and then, overhung the filed of literature; but they obstruct not the growth of any plant there. The Shakespeare or the Burns, unconsciously and merely as he walks onward, silently brushes them away. Is not every genius an impossibility till he appears?" Thomas Carlyle, An Essay on Robert Burns.
"Some of Shakespeare's fellow playwrights, like Christopher Marlowe, did have university degrees, but the fact is that many of the greatest authors in history never set foot in college. Geniuses are geniuses precisely because they do not play by the ordinary rules." Paul Cantor
The life of Ortega is complicated by no less than five parallel careers. He is at once a teacher, an essayist, a publisher-editor, a philosopher, and a statesman. . . . perhaps his very breadth of experience led him to an overall understanding that a narrower view of life would never have inspired. . . . Today few thinkers can venture into the wider reaches of school and society without becoming dangerously unskilled amateurs." [Introduction to] Jose Ortega y Gasset, Mission of the University
" [A painter] assured me that works of genius are arrived at only in solitude. This led me to the work of the moral genius in us, and I suspected the truth that in this matter, too, one must be alone. . . . Society does not think and work with the clarity of the wise individual man... [i]t has divided the whole of human development into parts, has distributed the branches and special tasks of these and has allotted to each station in life its special field of cooperation . . . But in this arises a certain incompleteness and pedantry. . . Human society must progress [and] such a state, occupied with progress toward perfection, can undertake nothing with agents who have never looked out beyond the narrow sphere of their special calling and can only go on in the old rut." --Johann Gottleib Fichte (1762-1814) from A Philosophy of Masonry: Letters to [Benjamin] Constant.
"Specialization increased on large, more densely populated islands." Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel
"In America a person with some kind of title, however trivial, will have an easier time of it than someone without. 'Person' is not good enough in the world's greatest democracy, not even 'individual.' One must be something. A dentist or accountant or lawyer is good, but even titles denoting lesser status--plumber, mechanic, farmer--make life easier. 'Artist' is an excellent title in some cases, a handle to give otherwise scruffy characters entrée to people and places which would otherwise be off limits." Charles House, The Outrageous Life of Henry Faulkner
"Publishing is the most fascinating profession in the world for a man who cares for books, who is interested in human beings and who has varied interests. He can make his business as wide as are those interests. He can indulge his hobbies. If he is interested in fishing, porcelain or stamps, he can, by publishing appropriate books, keep in touch with the most prominent figures in those fields in a way that as an unconnected amateur he could never do." Alec Waugh, The Early Years
"It is obvious that the efforts of the best poets and aesthetic writers of all nations have now for some time been directed towards what is universal in humanity. In each special field, whether in history, mythology, or fiction, more or less arbitrarily conceived, one sees the traits which are universal always more clearly revealed and illumining what is merely national and personal . . . . we cannot indeed hope that universal peace is being ushered in thereby, but only that inevitable strife will be gradually more restrained, war will become less cruel, and victory less insolent . . . . A genuine, universal tolerance is most surely attained, if we do not quarrel with the peculiar characteristics of individual men and races, but only hold fast the conviction, that what is truly excellent is distinguished by its belonging to all mankind." Goethe, letter to Thomas Carlyle, 20 July 1837.
"Men have called me mad but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious; whether all that is profound--does not spring from disease of thought, from moods of mind exalted at the expense of general intellect." Edgar Allen Poe
"I had no very clear concept of 'literati' . . They were people whose whole lives were devoted to art and literature, but for whom nothing was too exalted to question or laugh at. They were free spirits. . . .The 'exquisite indolence' of Ann Fleming and her friends was not a mere fluke of the British class system--it was an essential ingredient of literati culture, in both East and West. Literati are rarely great academics, because their curiosity leads them into odd byways that tend to disqualify them from serious scholarship. Likewise, they may not be the greatest of artists or writers, because they rarely have the ambition to build reputations in society or establish themselves commercially. In short, they are amateurs, whom the Chinese call hogai ('outside the system'). . . . It is my theory that only the badly behaved become truly great literati. You have to be the sort of person who would break windows or rattle your cigarette holder in Evelyn Waugh's ear trumpet. " --Alex Kerr, Lost Japan
"I think Mr. Kerr just might be mistaken as to the origin of 'hogai'. The Chinese word for amateur is 'yeyu'. I had the suspicion that 'hogai' was a Japanese word, so I looked it up in a Japanese on-line dictionary and, sure enough, there it was with the definition 'outrageous, exorbitant.' That definition seems to (roughtly) go along with the idea of 'rattling your cigarette holder in Evelyn Waugh's ear trumpet.' As to the etymology of 'hogai', since Japanese and Chinese characters have the same roots, I can vaguely decipher the two characters of 'hogai' as 'system, order' and 'outside,' so Mr. Kerr is correct in his analysis of the word, just wrong in its linguistic origins." --e-mail from Tobin Rhae Skinner [who, at age 22, shows promise of becoming a well-traveled scholar].
"The education of the gentleman-amateur, which at its best fostered sound judgment and the ability to express oneself, to assimilate great figures of the past and find one's way around in new terrain, sustained [Edmund] Wilson as a professional journalist." --Lewis Dabney, ed., introduction to The Edmund Wilson Reader
"[In New York] as in most provincial societies, the scholars, artists and men of letters shut themselves obstinately away from people they despised as 'fashionable,' and the latter did not know how to make the necessary advances to those who lived outside their little conventions. It is only in sophisticated societies that the intellectual recognize the uses of the frivolous, and that the frivolous know how to make their house attractive to their betters. . . My readers, by this time, may be wondering what were the particular merits, private or civic, of these amiable persons. Their lives, as one looks back, certainly seem lacking in relief; but I believe their value lay in upholding two standards of importance in any community, that of education and good manners, and of scrupulous probity in business and private affairs." --Edith Wharton, Looking Backward.
"The Paris salon: 'the ease and amenity to be found only where intelligent people of various callings, with a few cultivated idlers among them, predominate over the highly-trained specialist. The only completely agreeable society I have ever known is that wherein the elements are selected and blent by a woman of the world, instinctively alert for every shade of suitability, and whose light hand never suffers the mixture to stiffen or grow heavy." --Edith Wharton, Looking Backward.
[Walter Pater's] wispy and dilettantish tract Marius the Epicurean (1885) became [Bernard] Berenson's gospel. Marius was a self-made child of feeling, and [his] highest morality--the highest morality, Pater insisted--was art for art's sake, a disinterested precision of feeling, a sense of minute discrimination elevated to the order of religion or science." --Robert Hughes, Nothing If Not Critical.
[Among the crew of Endeavor sailing from Plymouth on August 25, 1768 to become the first English vessel to reach Australia was] "a brilliant, mercurial young amateur named Joseph Banks and the servants and specialists he had hired to accompany him. At twenty-five Banks was well educated (Eton, Oxford), well-connected, well-off (a rural fortune) and in the proper sense a dilletante: one who took an eclectic, educated pleasure in the world around him." --Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding
"Insight and practical activity are to be distinguished, and we ought to reflect that every art, when we reduce it to practice, is something very great and difficult, and that mastery of it requires a life . . . thus Goethe strove for insight into many things, but has practically confined himself to one thing only. Only one thing has he practiced, and that is the art of writing German. That the matter which he uttered is of a many-sided nature is another affair." Conversations of Goethe
"[Nietzsche's point was that] "Only through emulating a genius could an aspiring individual be redeemed from his own limitations and the opposition of the world. In this sense, as an object of emulation, Schopenhauer had served Nietzsche as redeemer . . . . The genius, redeemed from himself and his contemporaries by the example of the genius preceding him, justifies his generation. The genius creates the mental world in which the next generation will live, including that generation's genius. And that progression of genius is what constitutes history. History is a genealogy of geniuses."--Carl Pletsch, Young Nietzsche-Becoming a Genius
"There could always be traced, in the most barbarous tribes, and also in the most character-destroying civilization, some vestiges of a faith in genius, as in the exemption of a priesthood or bards or artists from taxes and tolls levied on other men . . .this reverence is the reestablishment of rational order, for as the solidest rocks are made up of invisible gasses, as the world is made of thickened light and arrested electricity, so men know that their ideas are the parents of men and of things; there was never any thing that did not proceed from a thought." Ralph Waldo Emerson
It were a piece of vain flattery to pretend that this Work on Clothes entirely contents us; that it is not, like all works of genius, like the very Sun, which, though the highest published creation of genius, has nevertheless black spots and troubled nebulosities amidst its effulgence,--a mixture of insight, inspiration, with dullness, double-vision, and even utter blindness." --Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.
