Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea - possessing them - that what has been said has still not been said enough.

As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius-- the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

Since when was genius found respectable?

The author of genius does keep till his last breath the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness, of a child, the "innocence of eye" that means so much to the painter, the ability to respond freshly and quickly to new scenes, and to old scenes as though they were new; to see traits and characteristics as though each were new-minted from the hand of God instead of sorting them quickly into dusty categories and pigeon-holing them without wonder or surprise; to feel situations so immediately and keenly that the word "trite" has hardly any meaning for him; and always to see "the correspondences between things" of which Aristotle spoke two thousand years ago.

Genius is childhood recaptured.

He who gives what he would as readily throw away, gives without generosity; for the essence of generosity is in self sacrifice.

What seems to be generosity is often no more than disguised ambition, which overlooks a small interest in order to secure a great one.

All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the safe and just side of a question is the generous and merciful side.

Men of the noblest dispositions think themselves happiest when others share their happiness with them.