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Genius is unquestionably a great trial, when it takes the romantic form, and genius and romance are so associated in the public mind that many people recognize no other kind. There are other forms of genius, of course, and though they create their own problems, they are not "impossible" people. But O, how deeply we should thank God for these impossible people like Berlioz and Dylan Thomas! What a weary, grey, well-ordered, polite, unendurable hell this would be without them!

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Genius is a high level of thinking. Every person wants to rise to the level of genius. But in order to be a genius, it is absolutely necessary to have good deeds along with high thinking. If we can express genius in one sentence, we understand that the main feature of genius is to feel the "joy and sadness" and especially the "pain and pain" of people and living things and be kind and helpful towards them. It is for this important reason that humanity as a whole remains flawed with its feeble thinking because it still does not understand. -Thinking is the raison d'être of thinking. To think and be silent, to speak, to listen and to see, to think, to think in order to serve humanity and be useful and useful to society. -It is very easy to erase from the lines every valuable thought that has been thought and written. But it is very difficult to write an explanation for an unthought thought.

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True brilliance has a well-known positive correlation with decency, much of the time—a fact the rest of us rely on, more than we ever know. The real world doesn’t roil with as many crazed artists, psychotic generals, dyspeptic writers, maniacal statesmen, insatiable tycoons, or mad scientists as you see in dramas.
Still, the exceptions give genius its public image as a mixed blessing—vivid, dramatic, somewhat crazy, and more than a little dangerous. It helps promote the romantic notion, popular among borderline types, that you must be outrageous to be gifted. Insufferable to be remembered. Arrogant to be taken seriously.

Genius, as we tend to talk about it today, is some sort of mysterious and combustible substance that burns brightly and burns out. It's the strange gift of poets and pop stars that allows them to produce one wonderful work in their early twenties and then nothing. It is mysterious. It is there. It is gone.

Genius' was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons á la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties.

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which begs a question. What precisely is genius? I believe that genius is not a person but a process, a process in which someone determines to uncover their gift and, for a period, is able to step inside it. The “gift” is a self-explanatory state, and like a prize awarded in a DNA lotto — say, being born into beauty or into wealth — genius is no reason for arrogance.

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Genius is not a single power, but a combination of great powers. It reasons, but it is not reasoning; it judges, but it is not judgment; it imagines, but it is not imagination; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not passion. It is neither, because it is all. It is another name for the perfection of human nature, for Genius is not a fact but an ideal. It is nothing less than the possession of all the powers and impulses of humanity, in their greatest possible strength and most harmonious combination; and the genius of any particular man is great in proportion as he approaches this ideal of universal genius.

Now, these men weren’t idiots. They were geniuses who paid a high price for their genius because the rest of their thinking was other-world. A genius is someone who travels to truth by an unexpected path. Unfortunately, unexpected paths lead to disaster in everyday life.

Genius is the ability to see things invisible, to manipulate things intangible, to paint things that have no features.

But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.

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Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people - less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their character.

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