And here we go creating great men out of artisans who happened to have stumbled on a way to improve electrical apparatus or pedal through Sweden on a bicycle! And we solicit great men to write books promoting the cult of other great men! It's really very funny, and worth the price of admission! It will all end up with every village having his own great man - a lawyer, a novelist, and a polar explorer of immense stature! And the world will become wonderfully flat and simple and easy to master . . Knut Hamsun
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
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Oscar Levant
It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.
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Gertrude Stein
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
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Carl Sagan
For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born...
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Robert Musil
More Quotes By Knut Hamsun
It was not my intention to collapse; no, I would die standing.
The poet must always, in every instance, have the vibrant word.. that by it's trenchancy can so wound my soul that it whimpers.. One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word; one must be able to give...
I can't even make up a rhyme about an umbrella, let alone death and life and eternal peace.
But what really matters is not what you believe but the faith and conviction with which you believe…
An increasing number of people who lead mental lives of great intensity, people who are sensitive by nature, notice the steadily more frequent appearance in them of mental states of great strangeness .. a wordless and irrational feeling of ecstasy; or a breath of psychic...
