Flawed Genius Quotes

I had that overwhelming feeling I get when I’m about to give up on a plan, that big rush of air when I realize that my stroke of genius has flaws, and I don’t have the brains or energy to fix them.

Naive people tend to generalize people as—-good, bad, kind, or evil based on their actions. However, even the smartest person in the world is not the wisest or the most spiritual, in all matters. We are all flawed. Maybe, you didn’t know a few of these things about Einstein, but it puts the notion of perfection to rest. Perfection doesn’t exist in anyone. Nor, does a person’s mistakes make them less valuable to the world. 1. He divorced the mother of his children, which caused Mileva, his wife, to have a break down and be hospitalized. 2.He was a ladies man and was known to have had several affairs; infidelity was listed as a reason for his divorce. 3.He married his cousin. 4.He had an estranged relationship with his son. 5. He had his first child out of wedlock. 6. He urged the FDR to build the Atom bomb, which killed thousands of people. 7. He was Jewish, yet he made many arguments for the possibility of God. Yet, hypocritically he did not believe in the Jewish God or Christianity. He stated, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws—this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos. Easy to see why the Romans, usually so tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly—how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it. Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. For all their logic, who lived in more abject terror of the supernatural than the Romans? The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism.

Intelligence rarely trumps human nature.

I wish I didn’t want the exotic man who knows the entire history of jazz, and instead wanted the teacher, who has his flaws but whose kindness is as rare as genius.

Flawed genius is better than flawless talent.

But if I've learned anything, it is that goodness prevails, not in the absence of reasons to despair, but in spite of them. If we wait for clean heroes and clear choices and evidence on our side to act, we will wait forever, and my radio conversations teach me that people who bring light into the world wrench it out of darkness, and contend openly with darkness all of their days. [...] They were flawed human beings, who wrestled with demons in themselves as in the world outside. For me, their goodness is more interesting, more genuinely inspiring because of that reality. The spiritual geniuses of the ages and of the everyday simply don't let despair have the last word, nor do they close their eyes to its pictures or deny the enormity of its facts. They say, "Yes, and …," and they wake up the next day, and the day after that, to live accordingly.

I wish I'd been accepted sooner and better. When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes--and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history. We choose our own lives. It is not simply that we decide on the behaviors that construct our experience; when given our druthers, we elect to be ourselves. Most of us would like to be more successful or more beautiful or wealthier, and most people endure episodes of low self-esteem or even self-hatred. We despair a hundred times a day. But we retain the startling evolutionary imperative for the fact of ourselves, and with that splinter of grandiosity we redeem our flaws. These parents have, by and large, chosen to love their children, and many of them have chosen to value their own lives, even though they carry what much of the world considers an intolerable burden. Children with horizontal identities alter your self painfully; they also illuminate it. They are receptacles for rage and joy-even for salvation. When we love them, we achieve above all else the rapture of privileging what exists over what we have merely imagined. A follower of the Dalai Lama who had been imprisoned by the Chinese for decades was asked if he had ever been afraid in jail, and he said his fear was that he would lose compassion for his captors. Parents often think that they've captured something small and vulnerable, but the parents I've profiled here have been captured, locked up with their children's madness or genius or deformity, and the quest is never to lose compassion. A Buddhist scholar once explained to me that most Westerners mistakenly think that nirvana is what you arrive at when your suffering is over and only an eternity of happiness stretches ahead. But such bliss would always be shadowed by the sorrow of the past and would therefore be imperfect. Nirvana occurs when you not only look forward to rapture, but also gaze back into the times of anguish and find in them the seeds of your joy. You may not have felt that happiness at the time, but in retrospect it is incontrovertible. For some parents of children with horizontal identities, acceptance reaches its apogee when parents conclude that while they supposed that they were pinioned by a great and catastrophic loss of hope, they were in fact falling in love with someone they didn't yet know enough to want. As such parents look back, they see how every stage of loving their child has enriched them in ways they never would have conceived, ways that ar incalculably precious. Rumi said that light enters you at the bandaged place. This book's conundrum is that most of the families described here have ended up grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.

The closest that either Voltaire or the other historical geniuses of the age -- Hume and Gibbon -- came to understanding unreason's creative potentialities was in their Ironic criticism of themselves and in their own efforts to make sense out of history. This, at least, led them to view themselves as being as potentially flawed as the cripples they conceived to be acting out the spectacle of history.

That wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry.

Unlike earlier thinkers, who had sought to improve their accuracy by getting rid of error, Laplace realized that you should try to get more error: aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth. “The genius of statistics, as Laplace defined it, was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them,” the writer Louis Menand observed. “…The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes.

A flawed rose is better than a flawless dandy lion.

Presidents and Kings are not apt to see flaws in their own arguments,” he wrote, “but fortunately for the Union, it had a President, at this critical juncture, who combined a logical intellect with an unselfish heart.

Logical reasoning may be a most convenient means of mental communication for covering short distances, but the curvature of the earth, alas, is reflected even in logic: an ideally rational progression of thought will finally bring you back to the point of departure where you return aware of the simplicity of genius, with a delightful sensation that you have embraced truth, while actually you have merely embraced your own self... anything you might term a deduction already exposes the flaw: logical development inexorably becomes an envelopment.

Flawless and faultless outcomes are not products of lawless and careless people. No lawless person is a genuine innovator. To your skillfulness, add good manners; to your willfulness, add carefulness!

The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw,' he said, 'was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws - this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos.

I had that overwhelming feeling I get when I’m about to give up on a plan, that big rush of air when I realize that my stroke of genius has flaws, and I don’t have the brains or energy to fix them. It

Greatness is not synonymous with perfection or popularity. In the long-arc narratives of male genius that reach far beyond a lifetime, greatness is established despite, and in the glaring light of, great flaws. Great men are by definition to be reckoned with and honored for the dilemmas they force us to confront, while the ways to castigate a woman of brilliance and ambition are second-nature and sometimes fatal, whether she’s deemed evil or merely, as they say, problematic.

forced to realise that Jobs was, for all his visionary genius, deeply flawed, odd and capricious …’ Davin O’Dwyer, Irish Times ‘This is an authorised but brutally honest account of the life of a legend of our age’ Herald Sun ‘Isaacson has done an outstanding

Exactly," he answers again, with that patronizing smile. Watson's approach to science contains such a vital flaw it nearly takes my breath away. How can one call oneself a scientist and begin one's investigation with a conclusion instead of building to one only after exhaustive research?

And I thought of all the women’s novels that lie scattered, like small pock-marked apples in an orchard, about the second-hand book shops of London. It was the flaw in the centre that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others. But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to the right or to the left. What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps.

Jack was the kind of guy you could take into any situation and he would figure out how to fit in. Wayne, not so much. So they didn't really ever bond." "You know what we therapists say about people who fit in in every situation?" "What?" "They have no inherent genuine personality. They aren't themselves, they are only who they think the current audience expects them to be. Flawed though some of Wayne's actions may seem to you, at the end of the day he sounds like someone who isn't afraid to just be himself, all day, every day. That takes a fairly strong sense of self, to not go against your natural instincts, to not try to make yourself into something you aren't in order to be better liked or more homogenous." "I never thought about it that way." "Most people don't. But if you look at some of the truly great minds and artists of our history, they are often people who didn't necessarily fit, who were outside the norm. Some of them had actual disorders, many of the great minds are now presumed to have some level of Asperger's or low-level autistic tendencies, but a lot of them were just left of center." "Are you saying that Wayne is a secret genius? Do I have a Jobs or Spielberg or something on my hands?" "Of course not. I'm just saying that fitting in, or caring about fitting in, isn't necessarily in and of itself the world's most desirable trait.

In the mid-1970s, players did not fraternize before games; in fact, oftentimes they genuinely did not like each other or resented one another’s success. It was before the modern big-money era of baseball when the players, each flush with cash and the accouterments of prosperity, began treating each other as coworkers and comrades in a billion-dollar enterprise.

The fear of being fundamentally flawed brings with it a related fear. It’s the fear that if you did make a full commitment to living in your Zone of Genius, you might fail. It’s the belief that even your genius is flawed, and that if you expressed it in a big way, it wouldn’t be good enough. This belief tells you to play it safe and stay small. That way, if you fail, at least you fail small.

The great majority of those who came to see me belonged to the gray brotherhood of obsession, people imprisoned within a single idea, an idea not even their own but appropriated from previous generations; people like the inventors of the perpetuum mobile; weak in imagination, and trivial and absurd in their solutions. Yet even they burn with that consuming fire of objectivity that forces a man to renew efforts that are doomed to failure. How pitiful are these flawed geniuses, these titans of stunted spirit, crippled at birth by nature, who, as one of her grim jokes, bestowed upon their talentlessness a creative frenzy worthy of a Leonardo. Their lot in life is indifference or mockery, and all that you can do for them is listen patiently for an hour or two and nod at their monomania.

Instead, what I try to convey to all those who come up to me with a simple reaction is that it’s important to look at Jobs not as a saint or a sinner but as a complex and intense and spiritual human whose strengths and flaws were tightly interwoven. People are complicated. Great geniuses are even more complicated. And Steve Jobs was one of the most complicated geniuses of our day and generation.

Now. If someone is divorced, in my book that's not a reason to write him off. No, I like to write men off for concrete flaws like yawning weird of holding a fork the wrong way or saying porridge. But the fact is I don't want to date a man with kids at this stage in my life. I like children fine, and I'm sure I'll love my own someday. But they add a layer of complication to a relationship that I'd just rather not deal with.

Emotions aren’t a bug in the programming, something left over from your malfunctioning lizard brain or incomplete childhood. You do not have these weird, unwieldy emotions that happen mysteriously to you, and you simply need to tolerate them, like that crazy uncle you have to sit next to at Thanksgiving dinner. Your emotions aren’t a mistake; they are some of the best parts of you. Feelings aren’t a design flaw; they are divine in origin.

It struck Hsing suddenly that Masada didn't even understand the nature of his own genius. To him the patterns of thought and motive that he sensed in the virus were self-explanatory, and those who could not see them were simply not looking hard enough. Yet he would readily admit to his own inability to analyze more human contact, even on the most basic level. That was part and parcel of being iru. What a strange combination of skills and flaws. What an utterly alien profile. Praise the founders of Guera for having taught them all to nurture such specialized talent, rather than seeking to "cure" it. It was little wonder that most innovations in technology now came from the Gueran colonies, and that Earth, who set such a strict standard of psychological "normalcy," now produced little that was truly exciting. Thank God their own ancestors had left that doomed planet before they, too, had lost the genes of wild genius. Thank God they had seen the creative holocaust coming, and escaped it.

The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw,' he said, 'was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws – this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos.' He laughed. 'Easy to see why the Romans, usually so tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly – how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it.

... nothing is easier than to distance ourselves from great figures, whether through a negative interpretation or through idealization. Denigration and idealization are twins with the same basic motive: to avoid taking responsibility for the discoveries before us and to avoid taking responsibility for emulating the lives of great individuals. If we find severe flaws in the personality of the "genius," we can look upon him as some kind of genetic freak, closely linked to the madman, whose contributions were almost an incidental offshoot of his weird personality. If we consider the great man a triumphant genius with a basically unflawed personality, we can make small demands upon ourselves since we lack genius and possess flaws. Still another way of dealing with the great man is simply through indifference. One explains his loneliness and suffering through the kind of cliches Reich hated: "A genius is always one hundred years ahead of his time," or, "A genius always meets opposition in his lifetime." The need for distance from greatness is especially intense when we are dealing with persons who make the implicit demand: You must change your life if you are truly to understand what I have discovered.

The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws—this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos. Easy to see why the Romans, usually tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly—how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it. Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. For all their logic, who lived in more abject terror of the supernatural than the Romans?

There is a myth about how something new comes to be. Geniuses have dramatic moments of insight where great things and thoughts are born whole. Poems are written in dreams. Symphonies are composed complete. Science is accomplished with eureka shrieks. Businesses are built by magic touch. Something is not, then is. We do not see the road from nothing to new, and maybe we do not want to. Artistry must be misty magic, not sweat and grind. It dulls the luster to think that every elegant equation, beautiful painting, and brilliant machine is born of effort and error, the progeny of false starts and failures, and that each maker is as flawed, small, and mortal as the rest of us. It is seductive to conclude that great innovation is delivered to us by miracle via genius. And so the myth.

The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw,” he said, “was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws—this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos.” He laughed. “Easy to see why the Romans, usually so tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly—how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it. Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. For all their logic, who lived in more abject terror of the supernatural than the Romans?

Microsoft’s success represented an aesthetic flaw in the way the universe worked. “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste,” he later said. “I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product.”116 The primary reason for Microsoft’s success was that it was willing and eager to license its operating system to any hardware maker. Apple, by contrast, opted for an integrated approach. Its hardware came only with its software and vice versa. Jobs was an artist, a perfectionist, and thus a control freak who wanted to be in charge of the user experience from beginning to end. Apple’s approach led to more beautiful products, a higher profit margin, and a more sublime user experience. Microsoft’s approach led to a wider choice of hardware.

A Woman’s Only Flaw Author Unknown “When God created Woman, he was working late on the sixth day. An Angel came by and asked, ‘Why spend so much time on her?’ The Lord answered, ‘Have you seen all the specifications I have to meet to shape her?’”  “‘She must function in all kinds of situations.  She must be able to embrace several kids at the same time, have a hug that can heal anything from a bruised knee to a broken heart.  She must do all this with only two hands. She cures herself when sick and can work 18 hours a day.’”   “The Angel was impressed. ‘Just two hands? Impossible!  And this is the standard model?’  The Angel came closer and touched the woman.  ‘But you have made her so soft, Lord.’ ‘She is soft,’ said the Lord, ‘but I have made her strong.  You can’t imagine what she can endure and overcome.’” “‘Can she think?’ the Angel asked. The Lord answered, ‘Not only can she think, she can reason and negotiate.’  The Angel touched her cheeks.  ‘Lord, it seems this creation is leaking!  You have put too many burdens on her.’  ‘She is not leaking.  It is a tear,’ the Lord corrected the Angel.  ‘What’s it for?’ asked the Angel. The Lord said, ‘Tears are her way of expressing her grief, her doubts, her love, her loneliness, her suffering, and her pride.’” “This made a big impression on the Angel.  ‘Lord, you are a genius.  You thought of everything.  A woman is indeed marvelous.’  The Lord said, ‘Indeed she is.  She has strength that amazes a man.  She can handle trouble and carry heavy burdens.  She holds happiness, love, and opinions.  ‘She smiles when she feels like screaming.  She sings when she feels like crying, cries when happy and laughs when afraid.  She fights for what she believes in. ‘Her love is unconditional.  Her heart is broken when a next-of-kin or a friend dies, but she finds strength to get on with life.  “The Angel asked, ‘So she is a perfect being?’ The Lord replied, ‘No. She has just one drawback.’ ‘She often forgets what she is worth.

suicide and scandal followed in his wake. The British weekly, the Sunday Referee (March 10, 1935) asked the question that over half a century later is only beginning to be answered. Who—and what—is Aleister Crowley? Around few men in contemporary life has been created such a wealth of fantastic fable and rumour as that which attaches to the name of this mysterious personality. Who indeed was this man, and why, if it were true he was guilty of so many unspeakable acts, was he never brought to justice or ever formally charged with any crime? To the modern student of Crowley, the answer to the second part of the question is simple. He was never charged with any crimes because there were no crimes to be charged with. And even if there were, to some, the magnitude and the importance of his work is such as to dwarf to insignificance an entire litany of personal flaws and excesses real or imagined. In the opinion of some of our contemporaries, Crowley was a genius of stellar magnitude. Currently his works enjoy a scrutiny and popularity that never was achieved in his

There’s more mystical nonsense written about the process of writing than almost anything. Inspiration, genius, “the muse.” So I want to lay out one huge, comforting, wonderful fact: the more you write, the better you get at it. Writing is like a forehand or driving a car or playing guitar. Practice makes you better. That’s not to say inspiration and genius don’t exist. Not everyone can become Tolstoy through hard work. What it means is that, wherever you start, you can improve. And the way to do it is to write a lot. I mentioned at the start of this piece that I’ve published eight books. When I flip through the first one now, I can’t believe it ever made it onto shelves. I see so many flaws and problems in it that I’m amazed. The reason is that I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words between since then. As long as you produce a little something every day, every week, in time, invisibly, you’ll get better. Trailing behind every successful writer are a million words that never saw the light of day. Sometimes it takes five million words. The most important piece of writing advice anyone can give or get is simple, and therefore can seem uninteresting, but it’s true: just keep writing.

In the story of Wagner and Wagnerism, we see both the highest and the lowest impulses of humanity entangled. It is the triumph of art over reality and the triumph of reality over art; it is a tragedy of flaws set so deep that after two centuries they still infuriate us as if the man were in the room. To blame Wagner for the horrors committed in his wake is an inadequate response to historical complexity: it lets the rest of civilization off the hook. At the same time, to exonerate him is to ignore his insidious ramifications. It is no longer possible to idealize Wagner: the ugliness of his racism means that posterity's picture of him will always be cracked down the middle. In the end, the lack of a tidy moral resolution should make us more honest about the role that art plays in the world. In Wagner's vicinity, the fantasy of artistic autonomy falls to pieces and the cult of genius comes undone. Amid the wreckage, the artist is liberated from the mystification of "great art”. He becomes something more unstable, fragile, and mutable. Incomplete in himself, he requires the most active and critical kind of listening. So it goes with all art that endures: it is never a matter of beauty proving eternal. When we look at Wagner, we are gazing into a magnifying mirror of the soul of the human species. What we hate in it, we hate in ourselves; what we love in it, we love in ourselves also. In the distance we may catch glimpses of some higher realm, some glimmering temple, some ecstasy of knowledge and compassion. But it is only a shadow on the wall, an echo from the pit. The vision fades, the curtain falls, and we shuffle back in silence to the world as it is.

Medieval man’s mind was far-embracing, encompassing the natural and the supernatural. It was piercing because he was tirelessly curious about nature and God. It was precise and utterly rational as shown in the age’s invention of the Scholastic method. Medieval man lived, so to speak, outside himself—in the open air amid field, stream, and mountain; under the sun, rain, and storms, never ceasing to marvel at the countless stars of the night sky. He stayed close to both his newborn infant and his dying parent. He raised his heart spontaneously in prayer. And so he knew that God was real, that life was flawed beauty, ever so lovely yet ever so fragile; and that immortality with unchanging happiness or despair was on the other side of the thin membrane of time.

The risk models developed by private firms, whether hedge funds, rating agencies, or banks, are not reliable guides to the future. Even when these models are applied by government regulators, their application is flawed, because they look to past market history as received truth. But markets, we must emphasize, are imperfect; they are the agglomeration of myriad investors, most of whom usually act rationally - usually, as history has shown, but not always. Even perfectly logical investors will panic, as will theatergoers at the mere possibility of fire, so as not to be last to the exit; this threat of contagion renders financial markets inherently unstable.

And that is why the seductive idea that if Einstein had been born three hundred years earlier, we could have had the benefit of the theory of relativity in the seventeenth century is so flawed. Relativity couldn’t have happened back then, largely because the problems that it responded to were not yet visible. Einstein may have seen further and deeper than his contemporaries (there is still a large role for individualism: Einstein really was a creative genius), but he wasn’t pulling insights out of the ether. As Johnson writes: “Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air.” Dyson is well aware of this aspect of creativity. “Every time I have gone for a patent in a particular field, someone else has got there first,” he says. “I don’t think there has been a single time in all the thousands of patents we have applied for where we were the first. With the vacuum cyclone, there were already a number of patents lodged.

He was an extraordinary man: talented, flawed, a creative genius who sang movingly about love while often wounding those closest to him.

In a deep and intractable recession one can never discount the possibility that a Republican could win the presidency against an incumbent Democrat. But if the GOP nominates a candidate too deeply flawed or too right wing to be plausible, it won’t really matter. The main thrust of the establishment’s policies will be implemented regardless of who wins. That is the genius of our two-party system. Birth

Years ago, when people would ask "What are you into?", an easy answer was, "Things that start with "F"....film, food, fabric....etc. wink wink." I am a voice of my generation, beginning in the 1940s and continuing until the present. I have lived in remarkable times and have met and befriended remarkable people. I didn't make these connections out of ambition. I'm adventurous but I'm also practical. Usually, I was just looking for a job and ended up with amazing people with great work ethics. I spent much of my time behind the scenes with people of substance, even genius. Practicality can lead you to magic. I am convinced that each person has an amazing story, whether told through a novel like Carol Shields' "The Stone Diaries" or described in terrifying detail in "Anne Frank's Diary". I was young in the time of extraordinary change in America, post-war and into the '60s and lo and behold, things have been changing rapidly ever since. I'm telling this story because I feel proud and grateful to have witnessed, and even taken part in, many moments of change and beauty. I hope I'm talking to young women who will see that your life's journey doesn't have to be planned, that you can stay open and resilient and let nothing bring you down. F*Words

... nothing is easier than to distance ourselves from great figures, whether through a negative interpretation or through idealization. Denigration and idealization are twins with the same basic motive: to avoid taking responsibility for the discoveries before us and to avoid taking responsibility for emulating the lives of great individuals. If we find severe flaws in the personality of the "genius," we can look upon him as some kind of genetic freak, closely linked to the madman, whose contributions were almost an incidental offshoot of his weird personality. If we consider the great man a triumphant genius with a basically unflawed personality, we can make small demands upon ourselves since we lack genius and possess flaws. Still another way of dealing with the great man is simply through indifference. One explains his loneliness and suffering through the kind of cliches Reich hated: "A genius is always one hundred years ahead of his time," or, "A genius always meets opposition in his lifetime." The need for distance from greatness is especially intense when we are dealing with persons who make the implicit demand: You must change your life if you are truly to understand what I have discovered.

For Aristotle, fourth-century BCE Greek philosopher, the starting point of wisdom, or philosophy, was metaphysics. Modernity, in its quest for self-destruction, has more or less rejected metaphysics. But metaphysics will never go away because metaphysics is reality itself—the study of the totality of what is. Metaphysics is the starting point in terms of actual foundations of knowledge and presupposition, yet it comes at the end of the process of pedagogy, as it is the highest science. Nowadays, aside from certain continental philosophers who follow in the train of genius writers like nineteenth/twentieth-century German philosopher mathematician Edmund Husserl, theoria and metaphysics have been jettisoned for pragmatism, postmodernism, and other forms of self-destructive prattle. [...] Unfortunately, certain basic flaws in Aristotle’s own position led to that decline, particularly his adoption of empiricism. Aristotle cut the world off from the possibility of any other world or reality or dimension, and while it took a millennium or two, this ultimately resulted in materialism, positivism, and finally the negation of all meaning and purpose.

Do you think that one great act of genius can allow us to forgive the hundred flaws and failures that bring it into being?

My Perezes were gorgeous, monstrous creatures whose flaws proved their humanity rather than obscured it. We would hide no more. To megaphone our genius when the nation denied us, to force a bearing of witness, that became my North Star.

Who has the right answers but I ignore because they’re not articulate? Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation? What do I desperately want to be true so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not? What is a problem that I think applies only to other countries/industries/careers that will eventually hit me? What do I think is true but is actually just good marketing? What haven’t I experienced firsthand that leaves me naive about how something works? What looks unsustainable but is actually a new trend we haven’t accepted yet? Who do I think is smart but is actually full of it? Am I prepared to handle risks I can’t even envision? Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different? What are we ignoring today that will seem shockingly obvious in the future? What events very nearly happened that would have fundamentally changed the world I know if they had occurred? How much have things outside my control contributed to things I take credit for? How do I know if I’m being patient (a skill) or stubborn (a flaw)? Who do I look up to that is secretly miserable? What hassle am I trying to eliminate that’s actually an unavoidable cost of success? What crazy genius that I aspire to emulate is actually just crazy? What strong belief do I hold that’s most likely to change? What’s always been true? What’s the same as ever?

That's the imposter complex - the fear that by showing ourselves we will be exposed as the flawed person we are.

There are four of these barriers: The first barrier is the false belief that we are fundamentally flawed in some way. If we carry this feeling within us, we sabotage our success because we think we're essentially bad. If something good happens, we must mess up to offset it, because good things can't happen to bad people. The second barrier is the false belief that by succeeding, we are being disloyal to and leaving behind people in our past. If we harbor this feeling within us, we sabotage our success because we think it's disloyal to our roots to soar too far into the stratosphere. The third barrier is the false belief that we are a burden in the world. If we carry this feeling inside us, we sabotage our success so that we won't be a bigger burden. The fourth barrier is the false belief that we must dim the bright lights of our brilliance so that we won't outshine someone in our past. If we hold this feeling inside us, we tend to told ourselves back from expressing the full potential of our innate genius.

the evil genius at play here is simply the flawed reality of human nature. And perhaps it’s the humans who have remembered incorrectly, because that’s a human trait. You and your friend remember clearly that it snowed at Wilderness Camp and you all had a snowball fight—but another friend contradicts you, saying there was only a dusting of snow, not enough for making snowballs, and now your memory is less certain. Or you vividly remember your friend dyeing her hair pink just before graduation, but she tells you years later that it was after graduation and even shows you a picture to prove it. Yes, human memory is also a simulation.

killer. When she was done, there was silence on the line for a moment. She braced herself, expecting the usual criticism she always received. “You think it’s flawed?” she asked. “No. Not at all. I think it’s genius.” She was surprised herself, and felt motivated. “What did Nelson say?” he asked. “I haven’t called him. I’m not going to.” “You have to,” he urged. “No I don’t. He doesn’t want me on the case. And after the exchange we had at the station, I doubt he’d even take my call.” “Well then let me shoot the lead to the State guys.” “Too risky,” she said. “If it turns out to be a dead end, who does the blame come back to? You? Me? Either scenario would not be good.” “That’s true,” Ellington said. “But what if it’s not a dead end? What if you apprehend the killer? You’ll have to call Nelson anyway.” “But at least I’ll have results. And as long as I catch the bastard, I really don’t care what my consequences are.” “Look,” he said sounding frustrated, “you can’t do this. Not alone.

Bell’s work, though impressive by any standard, was not without flaws.

The plan had several grave flaws, but this was its genius: if anything could be relied upon with almost mathematical certainty, it was that Bunny, at any given meal, would somehow manage to eat almost twice as much as anyone else.

Evaluating decisions and outcomes separately is equally important in the opposite case: bad decisions may occasionally result in good outcomes. You may have a flawed strategy, but your opponent made an unforced error, so you won anyway. You kicked the ball weakly toward the goalkeeper, but he slipped on some mud, and you scored. Which is why probing wins, critically, is as important, if not more so, as probing losses. Failing to analyze wins can reinforce a bad process or strategy. You may not be lucky next time. You don’t want to be the person who makes a poor investment, gets lucky because of a bubble, concludes he is an investment genius, bets his fortune, and then loses it all next time around.

Charlotte Brontë was a genius, whose work has resonated for centuries as an example of female intellect and expressive power. Her letters to Constantin Heger are some of the stupidest things I’ve ever read, a masterful, two-year-long demonstration of one woman’s inability to absorb the fact that the guy she liked did not like her. Mary Wollstonecraft was over a century ahead of her time on women’s education, and twice as far ahead on women’s sexual freedom. She still thought she’d rather drown than not have a boyfriend. Harriet Jacobs was possibly one of the bravest women who ever lived. She survived unspeakable atrocity, thanks only to her own daring, ingenuity, and resilience, and published one of the most important political documents of her age. And she was afraid that “educated people” would make fun of her grammar. She was scared, but she did it. That’s all being strong is, apparently: being scared, or flawed, or weak, or capable (under the right circumstances) of astonishing acts of stupidity. And then going out and doing it all anyway. Trying, every morning, to be the woman you want to be, regardless of how often you manage to fall short of your own high expectations.

Miller also believed both public and church-lead education systems were flawed and needed reform.

Often criticized for being a re-inventor: someone who rode on the coattails of others, Edison had his own peculiar talent for seeing flaws and working obsessively to improve and refine concepts and designs to make them functional and to develop streamlined and inexpensive means of manufacture for the inventions that were most in demand.

A genius is someone with flaws harder to imitate than his qualities.

If the Jews have not inflicted Him upon us, they nevertheless bear the responsibility of having conceived Him. That is a flaw in their genius. They could have done better.