Genius Quotes - page 45
.. Oh my dear friend, you whose voice called me towards my beautiful past, oh how I love you because you are young, you serve the idea, you understand the beauty of a life devoted completely to abstraction. Oh the devil you have done me, and the good of this devil. There is an atrocious page in my existence... I am not a woman. Neither love nor the family satisfies me. I don't like the baby. I detest the household. I love all works of the human genius, I adore art the beauties of nature and of the heart. The beautiful, the beautiful in all such as love and such as life.
Marianne von Werefkin
I knew a painter, a disciple of Gustave Moreau; he was truly a very fine artist, he knew his work quite well, and then ... he was starving, he did not know how to make both ends meet and he used to lament. Then one day, a well-wishing friend sent a picture-dealer to his studio. The latter inspected all his works, without discovering anything of interest: the works of the painter were simply not fashionable and therefore without commercial value. But at last the dealer found a canvas with some palette-scrapings in a dusty corner and was suddenly full of enthusiasm: "Here you are! my friend, you are a genius, this is a miracle, it is this you should show! Look at this richness of tones, this variety of forms, and what an imagination.
The Mother
Five years ago I spent two and a half months in Berlin, and every day I visited the museum to have at least a brief look at this divine masterpiece [a portrait of the soldier of fortune, Alessandro del Borro, then attributed to Diego Velazquez, and later to an unknown master], and every day my soul sang in response to it stronger and stronger. I was very sick then, and that genius alone reconciled me to my life when there was so much suffering in it. Looking at his creation, at these lines, at these half-tones (remember that shadowed jaw against the background or the column against the dress), at all this charm of the art, at this grand style, I started to want to live again, to see it again and again, to live on by painting and perhaps by painting alone.
Marianne von Werefkin
I have lost faith in myself and that is why my life has gone to the devil. Why: I have been strict with myself. I love art with a passion so selfless that when I believed that I saw that I would be able to serve it better by abstaining myself, so that another [Jawlensky] could succeed – I did it. And that faith was so great that it has endured, against all the tempests. You, you, in loving me like an imperceptible current, you have destroyed the calm, the serenity of my life. It was difficult but so intact... And the man to whom I have given all: my spirit and my heart, my inspiration and my affection, my cares and my concerns, my energy, my faith and my confidence, to whom I have opened all the treasures of my genius and of my soul, who enjoyed understanding and help – this man [Jawlensky] looks upon me with indifference and prefers kitchen-maids [domestic servant Yelena Neznakomova, who became pregnant, and gave Jawlensky his first child: a son] to me.
Marianne von Werefkin
Kuhn had the genius to find the words and sketch the concepts that made important old philosophical problems relevant to the public and newly discussable by philosophers. He had the strength of mind and commitment to lead the discussion. He could speak the truly incommensurable languages of physics, philosophy, and history, all necessary to frame and advance his epistemological quest. He wrote, as one of his admirers, Margaret Masterman, put it, in a "quasi-poetic style," sometimes veiled, sometimes with "rhetorical exaggeration," but always after careful and even painful thought. Or, to switch metaphors, he drew the portrait of science in the manner of the Impressionists. At a distance, where most viewers stand, the portrait appears illuminating, persuasive, and inspiring; close in, where historians and philosophers stare, it looks sketchy, puzzling, and richly challenging.
John L. Heilbron
I have no reason to suppose that Lenin gained his ideas from my books; but if that were true, I should be not a little proud of having contribute to the intellectual development of a man who seems to me to be at once the greatest theoretician of socialism since Marx and a statesman whose genius recalls that of Peter the Great.
Georges Sorel
Professor Hawking is heralded as 'the genius of Britain,' yet he believes in the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything and that life sprang from non-life. Why should anyone believe Mr. Hawking's writings if he cannot provide evidence for his unscientific belief that out of nothing, everything came?
Kirk Cameron
