Recognizes Genius Quotes

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

I'd learned enough from life's experiences to understand that destiny's interventions can sometimes be read as invitation for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn't take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Genius is seldom recognized for what it is: a great capacity for hard work.

Boys are idiots. Girls are idiots, too, of course, but boys are a special kind of idiot. A girl, for instance, will vote for a boy in an election, or go to a movie that's about a boy, or buy a book that features a boy hero (or villain). Boys are much less likely to return the favor. They can't wrap their feeble minds around the idea that this girl might have anything in common with them. It's like they can't recognize girls as human beings.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages... In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried

One man's insanity is another man's genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.

The man of genius may dwell unknown, but one always may recognize the path he has followed into the forest. It was a giant who passed that way. The branches are broken at a height that other men cannot reach.

By their very nature, idiots do not have the intellectual capacity to identify genius. All that idiots are mentally equipped to recognize are other idiots.

The equality in political, industrial and social life which modern men must have in order to live, is not to be confounded with sameness. On the contrary, in our case, it is rather insistence upon the right of diversity; - upon the right of a human being to be a man even if he does not wear the same cut of vest, the same curl of hair or the same color of skin. Human equality does not even entail, as it is sometimes said, absolute equality of opportunity; for certainly the natural inequalities of inherent genius and varying gift make this a dubious phrase. But there is more and more clearly recognized minimum of opportunity and maximum of freedom to be, to move and to think, which the modern world denies to no being which it recognizes as a real man.

The creative artist is the one wanting to make order out of chaos. The rest of us just accept disorder -if we even recognize it- and get a bang out of our five beautiful senses, if we’re lucky.

Crazies always recognize each other. I think Melville said it, in a slightly different context: “Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.” Of course, we’re not talking about genius here, we’re talking about crazies—but

Talent or skill wasn't how you recognized a genius. A genius was the person giving the world the eff-you salute while doing the impossible.

A great tactician creates plans. A good tactician recognizes the soundness of a plan presented on him. A fair tactician must see the plan succeed before offering approval. Those with no tactical ability at all may never understand or accept it. Nor will such people understand or accept the tactician. To those without that ability, those who posses it are a mystery. And when a mind is too deficient in understanding, the resulting gap is often filled with with resentment.

Socrates says. Recognizing your ignorance is the beginning of all wisdom.

there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance. Indications of this cosmic religious sense can be found even on earlier levels of development—for example, in the Psalms of David and in the Prophets. The cosmic element is much stronger in Buddhism, as, in particular, Schopenhauer's magnificent essays have shown us. The religious geniuses of all times have been distinguished by this cosmic religious sense, which recognizes neither dogmas nor God made in man's image. Consequently there cannot be a church whose chief doctrines are based on the cosmic religious experience. It comes about, therefore, that we find precisely among the heretics of all ages men who were inspired by this highest religious experience; often they appeared to their contemporaries as atheists, but sometimes also as saints.

Every genius is at once extraordinary and banal. He is nothing if he is only one or the other.We must remember this when thinking of rebellion. It has its dandies and its menials, but it does not recognize its legitimate sons.

All good teachers will tell you that the most important quality they bring to their teaching is their love for the children. But what does that mean? It means that before we can teach them, we need to delight in them. Someone once said that children need one thing in order to succeed in life: someone who is crazy about them. We need to find a way to delight in all our students. We may be the only one in their lives to do so. We need to look for the best, expect the best, find something in each child that we can truly treasure.... If children recognize that we have seen their genius, who they really are, they will have the confidence and resilience to take risks in learning. I am convinced that many learning and social difficulties would disappear if we learned to see the genius in each child and then created a learning environment that encourages it to develop.

Happy the writer who, passing by characters that are boring, disgusting, shocking in their mournful reality, approaches characters that manifest the lofty dignity of man, who from the great pool of daily whirling images has chosen only the rare exceptions, who has never once betrayed the exalted turning of his lyre, nor descended from his height to his poor, insignificant brethren, and, without touching the ground, has given the whole of himself to his elevated images so far removed from it. Twice enviable is his beautiful lot: he is among them as in his own family; and meanwhile his fame spreads loud and far. With entrancing smoke he has clouded people's eyes; he has flattered them wondrously, concealing what is mournful in life, showing them a beautiful man. Everything rushes after him, applauding, and flies off following his triumphal chariot. Great world poet they name him, soaring high above all other geniuses in the world, as the eagle soars above the other high fliers. At the mere mention of his name, young ardent hearts are filled with trembling, responsive tears shine in all eyes...No one equals him in power--he is God! But such is not the lot, and other is the destiny of the writer who has dared to call forth all that is before our eyes every moment and which our indifferent eyes do not see--all the stupendous mire of trivia in which our life in entangled, the whole depth of cold, fragmented, everyday characters that swarm over our often bitter and boring earthly path, and with the firm strength of his implacable chisel dares to present them roundly and vividly before the eyes of all people! It is not for him to win people's applause, not for him to behold the grateful tears and unanimous rapture of the souls he has stirred; no sixteen-year-old girl will come flying to meet him with her head in a whirl and heroic enthusiasm; it is not for him to forget himself in the sweet enchantment of sounds he himself has evoked; it is not for him, finally, to escape contemporary judgment, hypocritically callous contemporary judgment, which will call insignificant and mean the creations he has fostered, will allot him a contemptible corner in the ranks of writers who insult mankind, will ascribe to him the quality of the heroes he has portrayed, will deny him heart, and soul, and the divine flame of talent. For contemporary judgment does not recognize that equally wondrous are the glasses that observe the sun and those that look at the movement of inconspicuous insect; for contemporary judgment does not recognize that much depth of soul is needed to light up the picture drawn from contemptible life and elevate it into a pearl of creation; for contemporary judgment does not recognize that lofty ecstatic laughter is worthy to stand beside the lofty lyrical impulse, and that a whole abyss separates it from the antics of the street-fair clown! This contemporary judgment does not recognize; and will turn it all into a reproach and abuse of the unrecognized writer; with no sharing, no response, no sympathy, like a familyless wayfarer, he will be left alone in the middle of the road. Grim is his path, and bitterly he will feel his solitude.

Visionaries are those in the field of art and science who recognize novel patterns. They see beauty before the rest of us do.

Einstein also recognized the power of simplicity, and it was the key to his breakthroughs in physics. He noted that the five ascending levels of intellect were, “Smart, Intelligent, Brilliant, Genius, Simple.” For Einstein, simplicity was simply the highest level of intellect.

Lincoln’s genius was his ability to draw upon the talents of others, meld together diverse personalities who often did not trust one another, and then listen to their advice, recognizing that it was sometimes wiser than his own.

The unrecognized genius—that’s an old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one—the genius recognized too well? ... That a great many men are poor fools who can’t see the best—that’s nothing. One can’t get angry at that. But do you understand about the men who see it and don’t want it?

The unrecognized genius-that's one old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one-the genius recognized too well?

To say that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic merit, is no better than to say he is rheumatic or diabetic.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.

Among many other things, genius implies the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple, and to recognize inclusive structural principals.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts

And the voice, the voice which I had recognized under the mask, was on its knees before me was a man! And I began to cry... The man, still kneeling, must have understood the cause of my tears, for he said, 'It is true, Christine!... I am not an Angel, nor a genius, nor a ghost... I am Erik!

The genius of Donald Trump was recognizing that Americans instinctively felt that the press was lying. He was the one who put the laser focus on the press and their lack of accountability, and America came along with him.

With the confidence and peace of mind native to true genius, I lay my life story before the world, so that the reader may learn how to educate himself to be a great tomcat, may recognize the full extent of my excellence, may love, value, honour and admire me- and worship me a little. Should anyone be audacious enough to think of casting doubt on the sterling worth of this remarkable book, let him reflect that he is dealing with a tomcat possessed of intellect, understanding, and sharp claws.

Recognizing the artist Joseph Cornell's genius for recycling, he inscribed a book to him as the Benvenuto Cellini of Flotsam and Jetsam

It's easy to admire a genius after he is recognized, but what's hard is to recognize a genius in the making.

Black women’s genius is so rarely recognized, much less understood. And when it is recognized and celebrated, it is often too late.

knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius, and

We are all on the same road, some ahead of us and some behind. We do not always recognize ourselves as being among those who are struggling farther back, and misunderstand, scorn, and even persecute the ones who move ahead of us. History is littered with such as these: eccentrics, geniuses, idealists among those most noticeable. These change the world by force, though the change most often does not take place during their own time, they are so far ahead of it and therefore so rarely understood.

But the question for our purposes is whether the broad pattern of world history would have been altered significantly if some genius inventor had not been born at a particular place and time. The answer is clear: there has never been any such person. All recognized famous inventors had capable predecessors and successors and made their improvements at a time when society was capable of using their product.

At its very core, the story of Jack the Ripper is a narrative of a killer’s deep, abiding hatred of women, and our culture’s obsession with the mythology serves only to normalize its particular brand of misogyny. We have grown so comfortable with the notion of “Jack the Ripper,” the unfathomable, invincible male killer, that we have failed to recognize that he continues to walk among us. In his top hat and cape, wielding his blood-drenched knife, he can be spotted regularly in London on posters, in ads, on the sides of buses. Bartenders have named drinks after him, shops use his moniker on their signs, tourists from around the world make pilgrimages to Whitechapel to walk in his footsteps and visit a museum dedicated to his violence. The world has learned to dress up in his costume at Halloween, to imagine being him, to honor his genius, to laugh at a murderer of women. By embracing him, we embrace the set of values that surrounded him in 1888, which teaches women that they are of a lesser value and can expect to be dishonored and abused.

The professional respects his craft. He does not consider himself superior to it. He recognizes the contributions of those who have gone before him. He apprentices himself to them. The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique not because he believes technique is a substitute for inspiration but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come. The professional is sly. He knows that by toiling beside the front door of technique, he leaves room for genius to enter by the back.

THE CROWN OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS IS THE DOCTRINE OF forgiveness. In it the whole genius of prophetic religion is expressed. Love as forgiveness is the most difficult and impossible of moral achievements. Yet it is a possibility if the impossibility of love is recognized and the sin in the self is acknowledged. Therefore an ethic culminating in an impossible possibility produces its choicest fruit in terms of the doctrine of forgiveness, the demand that the evil in the other shall be borne without vindictiveness because the evil in the self is known.

Intelligence is far from blood types. While test scores are unquestionably heritable, their heritability is not 100 percent. It sits instead somewhere near the middle of the range of possibilities. While identical twins often end up with similar test scores, sometimes they don’t. If you get average scores on intelligence tests, it’s entirely possible your children may turn out to be geniuses. And if you’re a genius, you should be smart enough to recognize your children may not follow suit. Intelligence is not a thing to will to your descendants like a crown.

Cosimo was the Bill Gates of his day. He spent the first half of his life making a fortune and the second half giving it away. He found the latter half much more satisfying, once confiding in a friend that his greatest regret was that he did not begin giving away his wealth ten years earlier. Cosimo recognized money for what it is: potential energy, with a limited shelf life. Either spend it or watch it slowly deplete, like yesterday’s birthday balloon. Under

If you changed into a different style of clothes, and put on a hat and glasses, I might not recognize you. But no matter what I wear, my ducks always know who I am. Am I just a guy worth knowing, or do ducks just have superior intellects?

Rather than being medicalized or romanticized, mental disorders, or mental dis-eases, should be understood as nothing less or more than what they are, an expression of our deepest human nature. By recognizing their traits in ourselves and reflecting upon them, we may be able both to contain them and to put them to good use. This is, no doubt, the highest form of genius.

There's a reason why I tell this story. To me these Sunday painters represent myo—the strangeness of beauty—an idea that transcendence can be found in what's common and small. Rather than wishing for singularity and celebrity and genius (and growing all gloomy in its absence), these painters recognize the ordinariness of their talents and remain undaunted. It's the blessings in life, not in self, that they mean to express. And therein lies the transcendence. For as people pursue their plain, decent goals, as they whittle their crude flutes, paint their flat landscapes, make unexceptional love to their spouses—in their numbers across cultures and time, in their sheer tenacity as in the face of a random universe they perform their small acts of awareness and appreciation—there is a mysterious, strange beauty.

Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognized the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with the possible exception of being poor - the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery - and even being poor, as Trapnel himself asserted, gave the right to speak categorically when poverty was discussed by people like Evadne Clapham.

I first met Winston Churchill in the early summer of 1906 at a dinner party to which I went as a very young girl. Our hostess was Lady Wemyss and I remember that Arthur Balfour, George Wyndman, Hilaire Belloc and Charles Whibley were among the guests… I found myself sitting next to this young man who seemed to me quite different from any other young man I had ever met. For a long time he seemed sunk in abstraction. Then he appeared to become suddenly aware of my existence. He turned on me a lowering gaze and asked me abruptly how old I was. I replied that I was nineteen. “And I,” he said despairingly, “am thirty-two already. Younger than anyone else who counts, though, “he added, as if to comfort himself. Then savagely: “Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is this allotted span for all we must cram into it!” And he burst forth into an eloquent diatribe on the shortness of human life, the immensity of possible human accomplishment—a theme so well exploited by the poets, prophets, and philosophers of all ages that it might seem difficult to invest it with new and startling significance. Yet for me he did so, in a torrent of magnificent language which appeared to be both effortless and inexhaustible and ended up with the words I shall always remember: “We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow worm.” By this time I was convinced of it—and my conviction remained unshaken throughout the years that followed. Later he asked me whether I thought that words had a magic and music quite independent of their meaning. I said I certainly thought so, and I quoted as a classic though familiar instance the first lines that came into my head. Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. His eyes blazed with excitement. “Say that again,” he said, “say it again—it is marvelous!” “But I objected, “You know these lines. You know the ‘Ode to a Nightengale.’ ” He had apparently never read or heard of it before (I must, however, add that next time I met him he had not learned not merely this but all of the odes to Keats by heart—and he recited them quite mercilessly from start to finish, not sparing me a syllable). Finding that he liked poetry, I quoted to him from one of my own favorite poets, Blake. He listened avidly, repeating some lines to himself with varying emphases and stresses, then added meditatively: “I never knew that old Admiral had found so much time to write such good poetry.” I was astounded that he, with his acute susceptibility to words and power of using them, should have left such tracts of English literature entirely unexplored. But however it happened he had lost nothing by it, when he approached books it was “with a hungry, empty mind and with fairly srong jaws, and what I got I *bit*.” And his ear for the beauty of language needed no tuning fork. Until the end of dinner I listened to him spellbound. I can remember thinking: This is what people mean when they talk of seeing stars. That is what I am doing now. I do not to this day know who was on my other side. Good manners, social obligation, duty—all had gone with the wind. I was transfixed, transported into a new element. I knew only that I had seen a great light. I recognized it as the light of genius… I cannot attempt to analyze, still less transmit, the light of genius. But I will try to set down, as I remember them, some of the differences which struck me between him and all the others, young and old, whom I have known. First and foremost he was incalculable. He ran true to no form. There lurked in his every thought and world the ambush of the unexpected. I felt also that the impact of life, ideas and even words upon his mind, was not only vivid and immediate, but direct. Between him and them there was no shock absorber of vicarious thought or precedent gleaned either from books or other minds. His relationship wit

A genius must sometimes be a racist if we are to hope for elucidation. History is generously peppered with geniuses who despised the Jews, who dismissed the blacks, who objectified women. Are we to bury their great works because of this? The answer is a resounding no, we are not to. We are, all of us, human. We are, all of us, imperfect. Prejudice is evolutionarily implanted in our genes. We need to know The Tiger is a dangerous animal. We need not know that all tigers are not. Identifying the personalities of individual tigers does not serve our need to survive. Granted, it might make us more enlightened individuals and friends with some tigers, and I am all for that. I applaud that, but one must recognize that there is a tribal instinct in humans and it is at its base an instinct for survival. So accept that, mourn it, decry it, rail against it, but recognize it is a very human trait and have patience with it. Have compassion. Thank you and good night.

Military leadership is a journey, not a destination. It is continually challenged, and must continually prove it self anew against fresh obstacles. Sometimes those obstacles are external events. Other times they are the doubts of those being led. Still other times they are a result of the leaders's own failures and shortcomings. Political power and influence are different. Once certain levels have been reached, there is no need to prove leadership or competence. A person with such power is accustomed to having every word carefully considere, and every whim treated as an order. And all who recognize that power know to bow to it. A few have the courage or the foolishness to resist. Some succeed in standing firm against the storm. More often, they find their paths yet again turned form their hopes for goal.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

I recognize Eric for what he is: an Erudite disguised as a Dauntless, a genius as well as a sadist, a hunter of the Divergent.

It takes a conscious practice of reason to recognize greatness in the making and shallowness in the limelight.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty

If we are to help save the human race, we must first recognize the humanity in all, no matter their station in life.

You do not have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House.

I have come to recognize that the gift of expression, whether in speech, or in writing, or in any art at all, is totally and entirely inferior to a certain indescribable genius for life.

We are not so narrowly defined as society would have us believe. Yet the limits placed on our appetites, talents, and potential are implanted in us when we are children - too young to recognized the prisons built with words. We could blame it all on our families, but then we'd never find the keys to unlock our cells. The awful genius of our confinement is that we are both the prisoner and the warden. We tell ourselves daily that we aren't free to do this or that because we are this or that. To escape such limited thinking, we don't have to look far. The keys are in our pocket.

PROFESSIONAL DEDICATES HIMSELF TO MASTERING TECHNIQUE The professional respects his craft. He does not consider himself superior to it. He recognizes the contributions of those who have gone before him. He apprentices himself to them. The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique not because he believes technique is a substitute for inspiration but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come. The professional is sly. He knows that by toiling beside the front door of technique, he leaves room for genius to enter by the back.

May Jupiter grant that the Germans may recognize their strength and strive to aim for the highest, and they will be no longer men, but rather resemble gods, for divine and god-like is their genius.

I have never felt the need to worship someone or something, but I recognize the beauty of creation, the miraculosity of existence, and honor the genius behind the scene, who came up with all of this.

I knew exactly what phrase in the piece must have stirred him the first time, and each time I played it I was sending him a little gift, because it was really dedicated to him, as a token of something very beautiful in me that would take no genius to figure out and that urged me to throw in an extra cadenza. Just for him. We were – and he must have recognized the signs long before I did – flirting.

In every work of genius we recognize out own rejected thoughts'. Czyli żeby uznać coś za genialne , musieliśmy kiedyś o czymś podobnym pomysleć i bez sensu machnąć na to ręką. (...) Obiektywizm to fikcja.

Monte Carlo is able to discover practical solutions to otherwise intractable problems because the most efficient search of an unmapped territory takes the form of a random walk. Today’s search engines, long descended from their ENIAC-era ancestors, still bear the imprint of their Monte Carlo origins: random search paths being accounted for, statistically, to accumulate increasingly accurate results. The genius of Monte Carlo—and its search-engine descendants—lies in the ability to extract meaningful solutions, in the face of overwhelming information, by recognizing that meaning resides less in the data at the end points and more in the intervening paths.

We ate it sitting on the couch, bowls perched on knees, the silence broken only by the occasional snort of laughter as we watched a pert blonde high school student dust vampires on the television. In almost no time we were slurping the dregs of our third servings. (it turns out that one reason we're so good together is that each of us eats more and faster than anyone either of us has ever met; also, we both recognize the genius of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)

Trump’s personal lawyers, John Dowd and Jay Sekulow, recognized the dangers of letting their client sit down with prosecutors and how a man who had such difficulty sticking to the facts could carelessly walk into a perjury accusation.

It is absolutely from his vision of the whole, in which the genius always lives, that he gets his sense of the parts. He values everything within him or without him by the standard of this vision, a vision that for him is no function of time, but a part of eternity. . . . The scientist takes phenomena for what they obviously are; the great man or the genius for what they signify. Sea and mountain, light and darkness, spring and autumn, cypress and palm, dove and swan are symbols to him, he not only thinks that there is, but he recognizes in them something deeper. The ride of the Valkyrie is not produced by atmospheric pressure and the magic fire is not the outcome of a process of oxidation. And all this is possible for him because the outer world is as full and strongly connected as the inner in him, the external world in fact seems to be only a special aspect of his inner life; the universe and the ego have become one in him, and he is not obliged to set his experience together piece by piece according to rule. . . . The infinity of the universe is responded to in the genius by a true sense of infinity in his own breast; he holds chaos and cosmos, all details and all totality, all plurality, and all singularity in himself.

At first the creative mind submits to its entry into the symbolic register and gets itself structured like everyone else. Then he balks at a fateful moment which becomes a turning point in the history of his mental growth. From the entry into the imaginary order where he acknowledges his ego and then to the symbolic order where he recognizes his place in the society and finally in his de-symbolization or a refusal to obey the Law that is the rules of the world of symbols, a creative genius is born.

Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Genius has now all-but disappeared from public view; partly because intelligence (which is strongly genetic) is in decline in the West, partly because social institutions no longer recognize or nurture genius, and partly because the modern West is actively hostile to genius.

This is what “Make America Great Again” conveyed to many voters. Others heard a message that was altogether different—not an identity-based message, but an anti-elitist screed, or a populist call for government reform. The genius of the catchphrase, and what made Trump’s candidacy so effective, was its seamless weaving of the personal and cultural into the political and socioeconomic. His was a canopy of discontent under which the grudging masses could congregate to air their grievances about a nation they no longer recognized and a government they no longer trusted.

It is also worth noting that it was only through my urgent instigation that he printed a short poem of his own. This was in accordance with his essential unassumingness. Though not clearly conscious of it at the time, I now realize that in a young man of twnty-four his selflessness was extraordinary. The clue to his poetic genius was sympathy, not only in his detached outlook upon humanity but in all his actions and responses towards individuals. I can remember nothing in my observations of his character which showed any sign of egotism or desire for self-advancement. When contrasting the two of us, I find that - highly strung and emotional though he was - his whole personality was far more compact and coherent than mine. He readily recognized and appreciated this contrast, and I remember with affection his amused acceptance of my exclamatory enthusiasms and intolerances. Most unfairly to himself, he even likened us to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza!

Transition Initiatives are based on four key assumptions: 1. That life with dramatically lower energy consumption is inevitable, and that it's better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise. 2. That our settlements and communities presently lack the resilience to enable them to weather the severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil. 3. That we have to act collectively, and we have to act now. 4. That by unleashing the collective genius of those around us to creatively and proactively design our energy descent, we can build ways of living that are more connected, more enriching and that recognize the biological limits of our planet.

How do you see your own Jewish identity? I am proud of being a Jew-although I must admit it took me practically a lifetime to get there. I have suffered from the low self-esteem that is the bane of the assimilationist Jew. This is a heavy load that I could shed only when I recognized my success. I identify being a Jew with being in a minority. I believe that there is such a thing as a Jewish genius; one need only look at the Jewish achievements in science, in economic life, or in the arts. These were the results of Jews' efforts to transcend their minority status, and to achieve something universal. Jews have learned to consider every question from many different viewpoints, even the most contradictory ones. Being in the minority, they are practically forced into critical thinking. If there is anything of this Jewish genius in me, it is simply the ability to think critically. To that extent, Jewishness is an essential element of my personality and, as I said, I am very proud of that.

What we need is release, or emancipation. Emancipation is fundamentally different from empowerment. With emancipation we are recognizing the inherent genius, energy, and creativity in all people, and allowing those talents to emerge. We realize that we don’t have the power to give these talents to others, or “empower” them to use them, only the power to prevent them from coming out. Emancipation results when teams have been given decision-making control and have the additional characteristics of competence and clarity. You know you have an emancipated team when you no longer need to empower them. Indeed, you no longer have the ability to empower them because they are not relying on you as their source of power.

man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium . . . . Shakespeare can not be recognized either as a great genius, or even as an average author. . . . far from being the height of perfection, [King Lear] is a very bad, carelessly composed production, . . . can not evoke among us anything but aversion and weariness. . . . All his characters speak, not their own, but always one and the same Shakespearian, pretentious, and unnatural language . . . .

(1) identifying what their customers wanted (to be seen and heard), (2) defining their customers’ challenge (that people didn’t recognize their hidden genius), and (3) offering their customers a tool they could use to express themselves (computers and smartphones). Each of these realizations are pillars in ancient storytelling and critical for connecting with customers.

I knew exactly what phrase in the piece must have stirred him for the first time, and each time I played it, I was sending it to him as a little gift, because it was really dedicated to him, as a token of something very beautiful in me that would take no genius to figure out and that urged me to throw in an extended cadenza. Just for him. We were— and he must have recognized the signs long before I did— flirting.

In my experience, some Dzogchen masters are better teachers than others. I have been in the presence of several of the most revered Tibetan lamas of our time while they were ostensibly teaching Dzogchen, and most of them simply described this view of consciousness without giving clear instructions on how to glimpse it. The genius of Tulku Urgyen was that he could point out the nature of mind with the precision and matter-of-factness of teaching a person how to thread a needle and could get an ordinary meditator like me to recognize that consciousness is intrinsically free of self. There might be some initial struggle and uncertainty, depending on the student, but once the truth of nonduality had been glimpsed, it became obvious that it was always available—and there was never any doubt about how to see it again. I came to Tulku Urgyen yearning for the experience of self-transcendence, and in a few minutes he showed me that I had no self to transcend.

While the universality of the creative process has been noticed, it has not been noticed universally. Not enough people recognize the preverbal, pre-mathematical elements of the creative process. Not enough recognize the cross-disciplinary nature of intuitive tools for thinking. Such a myopic view of cognition is shared not only by philosophers and psychologists but, in consequence, by educators, too. Just look at how the curriculum, at every educational level from kindergarten to graduate school, is divided into disciplines defined by products rather than processes. From the outset, students are given separate classes in literature, in mathematics, in science, in history, in music, in art, as if each of these disciplines were distinct and exclusive. Despite the current lip service paid to “integrating the curriculum,” truly interdisciplinary courses are rare, and transdisciplinary curricula that span the breadth of human knowledge are almost unknown. Moreover, at the level of creative process, where it really counts, the intuitive tools for thinking that tie one discipline to another are entirely ignored. Mathematicians are supposed to think only “in mathematics,” writers only “in words,” musicians only “in notes,” and so forth. Our schools and universities insist on cooking with only half the necessary ingredients. By half-understanding the nature of thinking, teachers only half-understand how to teach, and students only half-understand how to learn.

People engage in a lot of self-deception,” she said with a firm grip on his arm to keep her balance. “They have this need to write books and get a PhD and become professors and noted intellectuals. But almost everyone’s mediocre. They’re intelligent enough to recognize genius and excellence, and with a bit of luck they may achieve something above average themselves. But the vast majority of people are middling. And they don’t want to accept that. Instead, they buy houses and build patios and have children, which serves as a watertight alibi. I never got to write that book, they say. Because I have the house and the patio and the children to take care of. And besides, they like it just fine at work. Next summer, they’re going on an extended vacation to France. They say they love to read, but how much do they really read? A book a month, if that. They say they wish they had more time to read. They say they wish they had more time to write. That they would love to write that book, but time. There’s not enough time.

But the nature we repress nonetheless survives in us. That is why, when we read the new master-work of a genius, we are sometimes delighted to find in it thoughts of our own which we had dismissed as valueless, moments of gaiety or sadness which we suppressed, a whole world of feeling we treated as beneath notice; the book in which we recognize them suddenly teaches us their value. I had learned from experience that it was wrong to smile affectionately when someone made fun of me and not to be angry with him.

As every parent knows or soon finds out, each child comes into this world with his or her own attributes, temperament, and genius. As parents, we are called to recognize who each of them uniquely is, and to honor them by making room for them as they are, not by trying to change them, hard as that sometimes is for us. Since they are already always changing as part of their own nature, it may be that this kind of awareness on our part is precisely what is called for to make room for them to grow and change in those very ways that are best for them and that we cannot

we can recognize that over the centuries we have imagined threat in the form of state power. This left us wholly unprepared to defend ourselves from new companies with imaginative names run by young geniuses that seemed able to provide us with exactly what we yearn for at little or no cost. This new regime’s most poignant harms, now and later, have been difficult to grasp or theorize, blurred by extreme velocity and camouflaged by expensive and illegible machine operations, secretive corporate practices, masterful rhetorical misdirection, and purposeful cultural misappropriation.

he indulged his genius for metaphor to the full, writing of how Communism and Fascism reminded him ‘of the North Pole and South Pole. They are at the opposite ends of the earth, but if you woke up at either Pole tomorrow you could not tell which one it was. Perhaps there might be more penguins at one, or more Polar bears at the other, but all around would be ice and snow and the blast of a biting wind.’126 Churchill was one of the first to recognize that the Fascism and Communism had much more in common than what divided them, and in their totalitarianism were in fact sister-creeds.

I think many of us live with this nagging sense that we could go deeper. That there is some elusive "next level" in our work that calls to us, haunts us in our dreams, but remains unarticulated in our practice. I believe that the dreaded "creative block" is not necessarily a lack of ideas, but that you recognize the ideas you ARE having are not what you were BORN to make. You can feel deep in your gut that you are capable of great things, that something wants to come through you, but YOU are blocking your core, the brilliance of your own spirit as it wants to be manifested THROUGH you.

Many people approach Tolstoy with mixed feelings. They love the artist in him and are intensely bored by the preacher; but at the same time it is rather difficult to separate Tolstoy the preacher from Tolstoy the artist—it is the same deep slow voice, the same robust shoulder pushing up a cloud of visions or a load of ideas. What one would like to do, would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under his sandalled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper—far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna's white neck. But the thing cannot be done : Tolstoy is homogeneous, is one, and the struggle which, especially in the later years, went on between the man who gloated over the beauty of black earth, white flesh, blue snow, green fields, purple thunderclouds, and the man who maintained that fiction is sinful and art immoral—this struggle was still confined within the same man. Whether painting or preaching, Tolstoy was striving, in spite of all obstacles, to get at the truth. As the author of Anna Karenin, he used one method of discovering truth; in his sermons, he used another; but somehow, no matter how subtle his art was and no matter how dull some of his other attitudes were, truth which he was ponderously groping for or magically finding just around the corner, was always the same truth — this truth was he and this he was an art. What troubles one, is merely that he did not always recognize his own self when confronted with truth. I like the story of his picking up a book one dreary day in his old age, many years after he had stopped writing novels, and starting to read in the middle, and getting interested and very much pleased, and then looking at the title—and seeing: Anna Karenin by Leo Tolstoy. What obsessed Tolstoy, what obscured his genius, what now distresses the good reader, was that, somehow, the process of seeking the Truth seemed more important to him than the easy, vivid, brilliant discovery of the illusion of truth through the medium of his artistic genius. Old Russian Truth was never a comfortable companion; it had a violent temper and a heavy tread. It was not simply truth, not merely everyday pravda but immortal istina—not truth but the inner light of truth. When Tolstoy did happen to find it in himself, in the splendor of his creative imagination, then, almost unconsciously, he was on the right path. What does his tussle with the ruling Greek-Catholic Church matter, what importance do his ethical opinions have, in the light of this or that imaginative passage in any of his novels? Essential truth, istina, is one of the few words in the Russian language that cannot be rhymed. It has no verbal mate, no verbal associations, it stands alone and aloof, with only a vague suggestion of the root "to stand" in the dark brilliancy of its immemorial rock. Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth's exact whereabouts and essential properties. To Pushkin it was of marble under a noble sun ; Dostoevski, a much inferior artist, saw it as a thing of blood and tears and hysterical and topical politics and sweat; and Chekhov kept a quizzical eye upon it, while seemingly engrossed in the hazy scenery all around. Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched, and found the place where the cross had once stood, or found—the image of his own self.

Steppenwolf knows well enough why he is unhappy and drifting, bored and tired; it is because he will not recognize his purpose and follow it with his whole being. ‘He is resolved to forget that the desperate clinging to the self, and the desperate clinging to life are the surest way to eternal death.’ Haller knows that even when the Outsider is a universally acknowledged man of genius, it is due to ‘his immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his patience under that last extremity of loneliness which rarifies the atmosphere of the bourgeois world to an ice-cold ether around those who suffer to become men, that loneliness of the garden of Gethsemane

Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray. Kabir That this insight into the nature of things and the origin of good and evil is not confined exclusively to the saint, but is recognized obscurely by every human being, is proved by the very structure of our language. For language, as Richard Trench pointed out long ago, is often “wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse of in a happy moment of divination.” For example, how significant it is that in the Indo-European languages, as Darmsteter has pointed out, the root meaning “two” should connote badness. The Greek prefix dys- (as in dyspepsia) and the Latin dis- (as in dishonorable) are both derived from “duo.” The cognate bis- gives a pejorative sense to such modern French words as bévue (“blunder,” literally “two-sight”). Traces of that “second which leads you astray” can be found in “dubious,” “doubt” and Zweifel—for to doubt is to be double-minded. Bunyan has his Mr. Facing-both-ways, and modern American slang its “two-timers.” Obscurely and unconsciously wise, our language confirms the findings of the mystics and proclaims the essential badness of division—a word, incidentally, in which our old enemy “two” makes another decisive appearance.

The older theories, which started from an erroneous conception of the social demand for money, could never arrive at a solution of this problem. Their sole contribution is limited to paraphrases of the proposition that an increase in the stock of money at the disposal of the community while the demand for it rClnains the same decreases the objective exchange-value of money, and that an increase of the demand with a constant available stock has the contrary effect, and so on. By a flash of genius, the formulators of the Quantity Theory had already recognized this. We cannot by any means call it an advance when the formula giving the amount of the demand for money (Volume of Transactions + Velocity of Circulation) was reduced to its elements.

These qualities—independence, contrariness, ambition, toughness, receptiveness to experience—are the blood supply to a creative mind and temperament; they are wellspring to imagination. The ferocity and peculiarity that shadowed him when he was a boy later made their own contributions to the man and to his poetry. Lowell recognized that he could be remarkable. When he was eighteen he wrote in a school essay that “the accomplishments of man are unlimited…when he places all the strength of his mind and body to the task, a new almost divine power takes possession of him.” The enlightened mind is “always questioning itself, always seeking means of self-improvement, and always striving for something higher.” While still in school, his friend Frank Parker

Great mathematical geniuses such as Pythagoras, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Fourier and Gödel all recognized that mathematics is ontological. ‘Real’ mathematics is ontological mathematics that tells us about reality; it’s not abstract mathematics that has no connection with reality, as most professional mathematicians seem to believe. Reality is 100% mathematical. Above all, Fourier mathematics is the key to the mystery of the universe because it’s the answer to the mystery of mind and matter and how they interact. Mind is the Fourier frequency domain and matter is the inverse Fourier spacetime domain, and the two domains are absolutely tied together in feedback loop. The universe, finally, is a hologram and holography is all about Fourier mathematics.

...the other calling, for me, is that we have to begin this process of truth-telling, that we have to recognize that we can’t get well if we don’t diagnose the disease. I mean, we have this instinct for quick fix and quick cure. And if you don’t know what’s wrong with you, you’re not going to know whether the cure that you’ve been prescribed is sufficient. And I think this process of diagnosing the many ways that we are not healthy is not something we should fear but something we should embrace, because once we’ve done that, I think we have the capacity, the genius, the strength, the ingenuity, the wherewithal to begin to address these maladies, this illness, and emerge as a healthier society, a healthier nation, a healthier place in the world for everyone. And that’s what animates the work that we’re trying to do now.

The uniqueness of Iago, like the uniqueness of modern war, does not lie in the spirit of destruction. That has always been common enough. It lies in the genius he dedicates to destructive ends. Modern war would not recognize itself in the portraits of Shakespeare’s classical and feudal fighters, in Hector and Hotspur, in Faulconbridge and Coriolanus, or in Othello himself. But let it look in the glass and it will behold Iago. In him Shakespeare reveals , with clarity of nightmare, the unrestrained intellect, instead of being opposite of force, and an antidote for it, as much of the modern world thinks, is force functioning on a nother plane. It is the immoral equivalent of war, and as certain to clead to it in due seasons as Iago’s machinations were to lead to death. “All other knowledge is hurtful,” says Montaigne, “to him who has not the science of honesty and goodness.

What can we conclude from all of these insights in terms of the role of symmetry in the cosmic tapestry? My humble personal summary is that we don't know yet whether symmetry will turn out to be the most fundamental concept in the workings of the universe. Some of the symmetries physicists have discovered or discussed over the years have later been recognized as being accidental or only approximate. Other symmetries, such as general covariance in general relativity and the gauge symmetries of the standard model, became the buds from which forces and new particles bloomed. All in all, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that symmetry principles almost always tells us something important, and they may provide the most valuable clues and insights toward unveiling and deciphering the underlying principles of the universe, whatever those may be. Symmetry, in this sense, is indeed fruitful.

a harbinger of a third wave of computing, one that blurred the line between augmented human intelligence and artificial intelligence. “The first generation of computers were machines that counted and tabulated,” Rometty says, harking back to IBM’s roots in Herman Hollerith’s punch-card tabulators used for the 1890 census. “The second generation involved programmable machines that used the von Neumann architecture. You had to tell them what to do.” Beginning with Ada Lovelace, people wrote algorithms that instructed these computers, step by step, how to perform tasks. “Because of the proliferation of data,” Rometty adds, “there is no choice but to have a third generation, which are systems that are not programmed, they learn.”27 But even as this occurs, the process could remain one of partnership and symbiosis with humans rather than one designed to relegate humans to the dustbin of history. Larry Norton, a breast cancer specialist at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, was part of the team that worked with Watson. “Computer science is going to evolve rapidly, and medicine will evolve with it,” he said. “This is coevolution. We’ll help each other.”28 This belief that machines and humans will get smarter together is a process that Doug Engelbart called “bootstrapping” and “coevolution.”29 It raises an interesting prospect: perhaps no matter how fast computers progress, artificial intelligence may never outstrip the intelligence of the human-machine partnership. Let us assume, for example, that a machine someday exhibits all of the mental capabilities of a human: giving the outward appearance of recognizing patterns, perceiving emotions, appreciating beauty, creating art, having desires, forming moral values, and pursuing goals. Such a machine might be able to pass a Turing Test. It might even pass what we could call the Ada Test, which is that it could appear to “originate” its own thoughts that go beyond what we humans program it to do. There would, however, be still another hurdle before we could say that artificial intelligence has triumphed over augmented intelligence. We can call it the Licklider Test. It would go beyond asking whether a machine could replicate all the components of human intelligence to ask whether the machine accomplishes these tasks better when whirring away completely on its own or when working in conjunction with humans. In other words, is it possible that humans and machines working in partnership will be indefinitely more powerful than an artificial intelligence machine working alone?

This was undoubtedly one of symmetry's greatest success stories. Glashow, Wienberg, and Salam managed to unmask the electromagnetic and weak forces by recognizing that underneath the differences in the strengths of these two forces (the electromagnetic force is about a hundred thousand times stronger within the nucleus) and the different masses of the messenger particles lay a remarkable symmetry. The forces of nature take the same form if electrons are interchanged with neutrinos or with any mixture of the two. The same is true when photons are interchanged with the W and Z force-messengers. The symmetry persists even if the mixtures vary from place to place or from time to time. The invariance of the laws under such transformations performed locally in space and time has become known as gauge symmetry. In the professional jargon, a gauge transformation represents a freedom in formulating the theory that has no directly observable effects-in other words, a transformation to which the physical interpretation is insensitive. Just as the symmetry of the laws of nature under any change of the spacetime coordinates requires the existence of gravity, the gauge symmetry between electrons and neutrinos requires the existence of the photons and the W and Z messenger particles. Once again, when the symmetry is put first, the laws practically write themselves. A similar phenomenon, with symmetry dictating the presence of new particle fields, repeats itself with the strong nuclear force.

Meanwhile, he continued to speak out on behalf of black citizens. In March 1846, a terrifying massacre took place in Seward’s hometown. A twenty-three-year-old black man named William Freeman, recently released from prison after serving five years for a crime it was later determined he did not commit, entered the home of John Van Nest, a wealthy farmer and friend of Seward’s. Armed with two knives, he killed Van Nest, his pregnant wife, their small child, and Mrs. Van Nest’s mother. When he was caught within hours, Freeman immediately confessed. He exhibited no remorse and laughed uncontrollably as he spoke. The sheriff hauled him away, barely reaching the jail ahead of an enraged mob intent upon lynching him. “I trust in the mercy of God that I shall never again be a witness to such an outburst of the spirit of vengeance as I saw while they were carrying the murderer past our door,” Frances Seward told her husband, who was in Albany at the time. “Fortunately, the law triumphed.” Frances recognized at once an “incomprehensible” aspect to the entire affair, and she was correct. Investigation revealed a history of insanity in Freeman’s family. Moreover, Freeman had suffered a series of floggings in jail that had left him deaf and deranged. When the trial opened, no lawyer was willing to take Freeman’s case. The citizens of Auburn had threatened violence against any member of the bar who dared to defend the cold-blooded murderer. When the court asked, “Will anyone defend this man?” a “death-like stillness pervaded the crowded room,” until Seward rose, his voice strong with emotion, and said, “May it please the court, I shall remain counsel for the prisoner until his death!

The empowerment triangle turns drama upside-down, transforming the persecutor (or scapegoat) into a challenger, the rescuer into a coach, and the victim into a creator. The empowerment dynamic allows all the roles to be essential for growth. In the drama triangle, the persecutor works with issues of power, the rescuer works with issues of responsibility, and the victim works with area of vulnerability: The drama triangle is familiar to many of us. We all know this pattern inside ourselves. We get stuck in a situation that we want to escape, and it creates drama. By leaning into the dynamic and entering deeper into relationship, we can work the energy so that it becomes an enriching transformation. If you can work this in a group, then you’ve subdued the scapegoat archetype and turned it into something more life affirming. The most important thing about the drama triangle is to make people aware of it. When a group can understand and recognize how this is a kind of destructive pattern, it becomes empowered to change the pattern. Uncoupling drama from our organizational and personal lives is the key. The group as a whole can embody a role to create safety and make sense of the system. Transformation from the drama to the redeemed starts with a pause, then an inquiry of what’s happening here, then a recollection of the three roles and who is playing what role in this context. Once the system is self-aware, ask the questions: “what else is possible? How can I become so centered that something new can happen? How can a new perception take place?” With enough safety and connection, the group will be able to follow the healing energy into re-organization and re-integration of the parts. Claiming or remembering your own archetype can protect against falling into one.

the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over five other options.35 On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.”36 That precisely described the mix that had become the formula for innovation in the digital age. The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio” column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken, Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment and our experiment,

Every special human being strives instinctively for his own castle and secrecy, where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the majority—where he can forget the rule-bound "people," for he is an exception to them;—but for the single case where he is pushed by an even stronger instinct straight against these rules, as a person who seeks knowledge in a great and exceptional sense. Anyone who, in his intercourse with human beings, does not, at one time or another, shimmer with all the colours of distress—green and gray with disgust, surfeit, sympathy, gloom, and loneliness—is certainly not a man of higher taste. But provided he does not take all this weight and lack of enthusiasm freely upon himself, always keeps away from it, and stays, as mentioned, hidden, quiet, and proud in his castle, well, one thing is certain: he is not made for, not destined for, knowledge. For if he were, he would one day have to say to himself, "The devil take my good taste! The rule-bound man is more interesting than the exception—than I am, the exception!"— and he would make his way down , above all, "inside." The study of the average man—long, serious, and requiring much disguise, self-control, familiarity, bad company - (all company is bad company except with one’s peers):—that constitutes a necessary part of the life story of every philosopher, perhaps the most unpleasant, foul-smelling part, the richest in disappointments. But if he’s lucky, as is appropriate for a fortunate child of knowledge, he encounters real shortcuts and ways of making his task easier; I’m referring to the so-called cynics, those who, as cynics, simply recognize the animal, the meanness, the "rule-bound man" in themselves and, in the process, still possess that degree of intellectual quality and urge to have to talk about themselves and people like them before witnesses;—now and then they even wallow in books, as if in their very own dung. Cynicism is the single form in which common souls touch upon what honesty is, and the higher man should open his ears to every cruder and more refined cynicism and think himself lucky every time a shameless clown or a scientific satyr announces himself directly in front of him. There are even cases where enchantment gets mixed into the disgust—for example, in those places where, by some vagary of nature, genius is bound up with such an indiscreet billy-goat and ape; as in the Abbé Galiani, the most profound, sharp-sighted, and perhaps also the foulest man of his century—he was much deeper than Voltaire and consequently a good deal quieter. More frequently it happens that, as I’ve intimated, the scientific head is set on an ape’s body, a refined and exceptional understanding in a common soul; among doctors and moral physiologists, for example, that’s not an uncommon occurrence. And where anyone speaks without bitterness and quite harmlessly of men as a belly with two different needs and a head with one, everywhere someone constantly sees, looks for, and wants to see only hunger, sexual desires, and vanity, as if these were the real and only motivating forces in human actions, in short, wherever people speak "badly" of human beings—not even in a nasty way—there the lover of knowledge should pay fine and diligent attention; he should, in general, direct his ears to wherever people talk without indignation. For the indignant man and whoever is always using his own teeth to tear himself apart or lacerate himself (or, as a substitute for that, the world, or God, or society) may indeed, speaking morally, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more ordinary, the more trivial, the more uninstructive case. And no one lies as much as the indignant man.

According to the [evolutionist explanation of the instinct of animals], instinct is the expression of the heredity of a species, of an accumulation of analogous experiences down the ages. This is how they explain, for example, the fact that a flock of sheep hastily gathers together around the lambs the moment it perceives the shadow of a bird of prey, or that a kitten while playing already employs all the tricks of a hunter, or that birds know how to build their nests. In fact, it is enough to watch animals to see that their instinct has nothing of an automatism about it. The formation of such a mechanism by a purely cumulative . . . process is highly improbable, to say the least. Instinct is a nonreflective modality of the intelligence; it is determined, not by a series of automatic reflexes, but by the “form”—the qualitative determination—of the species. This form is like a filter through which the universal intelligence is manifested. . . The same is also true for man: his intelligence too is determined by the subtle form of his species. This form, however, includes the reflective faculty, which allows of a singularization of the individual such as does not exist among the animals. Man alone is able to objectivize himself. He can say: “I am this or that.” He alone possesses this two-edged faculty. Man, by virtue of his own central position in the cosmos, is able to transcend his specific norm; he can also betray it, and sink lower; "The corruption of the best is corruption at its worst." A normal animal remains true to the form and genius of its species; if its intelligence is not reflective and objectifying, but in some sort existential, it is nonetheless spontaneous; it is assuredly a form of the universal intelligence even if it is not recognized as such by men who, from prejudice or ignorance, identify intelligence with discursive thought exclusively.

We shot The Local Stigmatic for a few weeks in Atlanta, with David Wheeler as our director, and a principal cast of myself, Paul Guilfoyle, Joe Maher, and Michael Higgins. When it was finished, we showed the film around to people we admired. We had a great dinner gathering of artists and literati in London. People like Tom Stoppard and David Hare, who all sat at a long table. Harold Pinter had seen the film twice at this point; he sat at the head of the table, and when he wanted to speak to everyone, he rang a little bell and the group fell silent. “Every once in a while,” he said, “we see something different. We come into contact with art in film.” I just sat there stunned. Heathcote was in the room, fiddling with a coin and not looking up at anyone, playing the role of the shy genius. He’d been described as a protégé of Pinter’s, but to actually be in the same room as his literary idol, I guess it all was just too much for him. I ran the film once for Elaine May, the great actress and filmmaker, who told me, “I liked it very much. But don’t you ever show this to the public. You don’t know your fame. You don’t understand it, and you don’t understand how it registers. You must recognize it.” And she was right. You’re too well-known for this sort of thing. You have to be careful, because you’re going to startle people. Don’t put this in a theater. I showed it to Jonas Mekas, the independent-film impresario of downtown Manhattan, who ran The Local Stigmatic at his Anthology Film Archives and told me, somewhat optimistically, that I was going to win an Oscar for it. I kept calling Andrew Sarris, the film critic for The Village Voice, to come and see it. And he said, “Stop bothering me, Al. I’ve seen it three times already. I’ve told you what I think. Just show the thing already.” I was trying to get the confidence to screen it for wider audiences. I never did. I’ve come to realize that when I do my own things, nobody goes. Those avant-garde influences that I was brought up with never left my brain. When I’m left on my own, that’s just what seems to come out. It’s a drawback. People come in with expectations, and they leave angry. The Local Stigmatic is such a specific distillation of me and my take on this subject. It’s 150 proof, which can be a little strong for some people.

Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority—where he may forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;—exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense. Whoever, in intercourse with men, does not occasionally glisten in all the green and grey colours of distress, owing to disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloominess, and solitariness, is assuredly not a man of elevated tastes; supposing, however, that he does not voluntarily take all this burden and disgust upon himself, that he persistently avoids it, and remains, as I said, quietly and proudly hidden in his citadel, one thing is then certain: he was not made, he was not predestined for knowledge. For as such, he would one day have to say to himself: "The devil take my good taste! but 'the rule' is more interesting than the exception—than myself, the exception!" And he would go DOWN, and above all, he would go "inside." The long and serious study of the AVERAGE man—and consequently much disguise, self-overcoming, familiarity, and bad intercourse (all intercourse is bad intercourse except with one's equals):—that constitutes a necessary part of the life-history of every philosopher; perhaps the most disagreeable, odious, and disappointing part. If he is fortunate, however, as a favourite child of knowledge should be, he will meet with suitable auxiliaries who will shorten and lighten his task; I mean so-called cynics, those who simply recognize the animal, the commonplace and "the rule" in themselves, and at the same time have so much spirituality and ticklishness as to make them talk of themselves and their like BEFORE WITNESSES—sometimes they wallow, even in books, as on their own dung-hill. Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach what is called honesty; and the higher man must open his ears to all the coarser or finer cynicism, and congratulate himself when the clown becomes shameless right before him, or the scientific satyr speaks out. There are even cases where enchantment mixes with the disgust—namely, where by a freak of nature, genius is bound to some such indiscreet billy-goat and ape, as in the case of the Abbé Galiani, the profoundest, acutest, and perhaps also filthiest man of his century—he was far profounder than Voltaire, and consequently also, a good deal more silent. It happens more frequently, as has been hinted, that a scientific head is placed on an ape's body, a fine exceptional understanding in a base soul, an occurrence by no means rare, especially among doctors and moral physiologists. And whenever anyone speaks without bitterness, or rather quite innocently, of man as a belly with two requirements, and a head with one; whenever any one sees, seeks, and WANTS to see only hunger, sexual instinct, and vanity as the real and only motives of human actions; in short, when any one speaks "badly"—and not even "ill"—of man, then ought the lover of knowledge to hearken attentively and diligently; he ought, in general, to have an open ear wherever there is talk without indignation. For the indignant man, and he who perpetually tears and lacerates himself with his own teeth (or, in place of himself, the world, God, or society), may indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more ordinary, more indifferent, and less instructive case. And no one is such a LIAR as the indignant man.

Predictions of Nazi decline ignore the very potent electoral advantages the party retained even after the November setback. To begin with, they had made themselves the most diverse, most wide-ranging political party in the country. The other right-wing parties were devoted to the past, enmeshed with the hated economic establishment or, worse from a popular point of view, yearning for a restoration of the monarchy. (They often referred to the Weimar years as the “Kaiserless time.”) Those positions would do nothing to enhance their electability in popular elections. The left-wing parties, on the other hand, preached a Marxism either in its hard version (Communism) or soft version (Socialism) that alienated more people than it attracted. And the centrist parties had simply evaporated as weak alternatives with no real ideas or solutions. Gregor Strasser explained the inherent strength of his party’s political thinking: “From the right we shall take nationalism, which has so disastrously allied itself with capitalism, and from the left we shall take socialism, which has made such an unhappy union with internationalism. Thus we shall form the National Socialism which will be the motive force of a new Germany and a new Europe.” Hitler was more succinct; no one summed up the political situation better than he did: “The nationalists on the right lacked social awareness,” he said, and “the socialists on the left lacked national awareness.” The political genius of the Nazis was to recognize an opening that once taken advantage of became so large that a Panzer division could drive through it.

Maturity sees that the past is not to be rejected, destroyed, or replaced, but rather that it is to be judged and corrected, that the work of judgment and correction is endless, and that it necessarily involves one's own past. The industrial economy has made a general principle of the youthful antipathy to the past, and the modern world abounds with heralds of "a better future" and with debunkers happy to point out that Yeast was "silly like us" or that Thomas Jefferson may have had a Negro slave as a mistress - and so we are disencumbered of the burden of great lives, set free to be as cynical or desperate as we please. Cultural forms, it is held, should change apace to keep up with technology. Sexual discipline should be replaced by the chemicals, devices, and procedures of "birth control," and poetry must hasten to accept the influence of typewriter or computer. It can be better argued that cultural forms ought to change by analogy with biological forms. I assume that they do change in that way, and by the same necessity to respond to changes of circumstance. It is necessary, nevertheless, to recognize a difference in kinds of cultural change: there is change by necessity, or adaptation; and there is contrived change, or novelty. The first is the work of species or communities or lineages of descent, occurring usually by slow increments over a long time. The second is the work of individual minds, and it happens, or is intended to happen, by fiat. Individual attempts to change cultural form - as to make a new kind of marriage or family or community - are nearly always shallow or foolish and are frequently totalitarian. The assumption that it can easily be otherwise comes from the faith in genius. To adopt a communal form with the idea of chain or discarding it according to individual judgment is hopeless, the despair and death of meaning. To keep the form is an act of faith in possibility, not of the form, but of the life that is given to it; the form is a question addressed to life and time, which only life and time can answer. Individual genius, then, goes astray when it proposes to do the work of community. We rightly follow its promptings, on the other hand, when it can point out correctly that we have gone astray - when forms have become rigid or empty, when we have forgot their use or their meaning. We then follow our genius or our geniuses back to reverence, to truth, or to nature. This alternation is one of the long rhythms. But the faith in genius and the rebellions of genius, at the times when thee are necessary, should lead to the renewal of forms, not to their destruction.

Donald Trump is a special kind of cultist. He is in no way totalistic—his beliefs can be remarkably fluid—nor is he the leader of a sealed-off cultic community. Rather, his cultism is inseparable from his solipsistic reality. That solipsism emanates only from the self and what the self requires, which makes him the most bizarre and persistent would-be owner of reality. And in his way he has created a community of zealous believers who are geographically dispersed. A considerable portion of his base can be understood as cultist, as followers of a guru who is teacher, guide, and master. From my studies of cults and cultlike behavior, I recognize this aspect of Trump’s relationship to his followers. It is evident at his large-crowd events, which began as campaign rallies but have continued to take place during his presidency. There is a ritual quality to the chants he has led such as “Lock her up!” and “Build that wall!” The latter chant is followed by the guru’s question “And who will pay for it?,” then the crowd’s answer, “Mexico!” The chants and responses are less about policy than they are assertions of guru-disciple ties. The chants are rituals that generate “high states”—or what can even be called experiences of transcendence—in disciples. The back-and-forth brings them closer to the guru and enables them to share his claim to omnipotence and his sacred aura. Trump does not directly express an apocalyptic narrative, but his presence has an apocalyptic aura. He tells us that, as not only a “genius” but a “very stable genius,” he alone can “fix” the terrible problems of our society. To be sure these are bizarre expressions of his extreme grandiosity, but also of a man who would be a savior to a disintegrating world.

Every once in a while, someone makes a risky bet on an improbable or uncertain outcome and ends up looking like a genius. But we should recognize that it happened because of luck and boldness, not skill.

Telepathy” is public and mythical version of something real. This is same way that many religions teach metempsychosis because truth of reincarnation is too impersonal and too hard to grasp. It’s not out of the question that we are constantly receiving motions inside the unity of things from many inanimate objects, some possibly on the other side of the known universe, but occasionally from people we know, trees, and many other objects. We may have close bond on this level with individuals related to us, even in the future, or an intimation of those that the genius of the species intends as our mate, because it wants the production of this or that child at this or that moment. The most significant of these “telepathic” connections is indeed when two such people, supremely suitable for each other on a biological path, recognize in each other this inner intention or striving of nature for the production of something—of course they think it’s about something very different. In the normal case this is almost always man and woman, for production of a certain child, that nature wants to bring into emergence. But on rare cases there can be other reasons for similar connection in will, such as, two friends who are intended to achieve some task together. “We reach out with open arms in anticipation of satisfying our desire or delusion, meanwhile nature achieves her secret intention”: it is so in the birth of certain children, but also of other things.

A dandy," wrote Charles Baudelaire, "must be looking in his mirror at all times, waking and sleeping." Dali could easily have become the living proof of Baudelaire's dictum. But the literal mirror was not enough for him. Dali needed mirrors of many kinds: his pictures, his admirers, newspapers and magazines and television. And even that still left him unsatisfied. So one Christmas he took a walk in the streets of New York carrying a bell. He would ring it whenever he felt people were not paying enough attention to him. "The thought of not being recognised was unbearable." True to himself to the bitter end, he delighted in following Catalonian television's bulletins on his state of health during his last days alive (in Quiron hospital in Barcelona); he wanted to hear people talking about him, and he also wanted to know whether his health would revive or whether he would be dying soon. At the age of six he wanted to be a female cook - he specified the gender. At seven he wanted to be Napoleon. "Ever since, my ambition has been continually on the increase, as has my megalomania: now all I want to be is Salvador Dali. But the closer I get to my goal, the further Salvador Dali drifts away from me." He painted his first picture in 1910 at the age of six. At ten he discovered Impressionist art, and at fourteen the Pompiers (a 19th century group of academic genre painters, among them Meissonier, Detaille and Moreau). By 1927 he was Dali, and the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, a friend of his youth, wrote an 'Ode to Salvador Dali.' Years later Dali claimed that Lorca had been very attracted to him and had tride to sodomize him, but had not quite managed it. Dali's thirst for scandal was unquenchable. His parents had named him Salvador "because he was the chosen one who was come to save painting from the" deadly menace of abstract art, academic Surrealism, Dadaism, and any kind of anarchic "ism" whatsoever." If he had lived during the Renaissance, his genius would have been recognized at an earlier stage and indeed considered normal. But in the twentieth century, which Dali damned as stupid, he was thought provocative, a thorn in the flesh. To this day there are many who misunderstand the provocativeness and label him insane. But Dali repeatedly declared: "... the sole difference between me and a madman is the fact that I am not mad!" Dali also said: "The difference between the Surrealists and me is that I am a Surrealist" - which is perfectly true. And he also claimed: "I have the universal curiosity of Renaissance men, and my mental jaws are constantly at work.

REVERSAL The reversal to mastery is to deny its existence or its importance, and therefore the need to strive for it in any way. But such a reversal can only lead to feelings of powerlessness and disappointment. This reversal leads to enslavement to what we shall call the false self. Your false self is the accumulation of all the voices you have internalized from other people—parents and friends who want you to conform to their ideas of what you should be like and what you should do, as well as societal pressures to adhere to certain values that can easily seduce you. It also includes the voice of your own ego, which constantly tries to protect you from unflattering truths. This self talks to you in clear words, and when it comes to mastery, it says things like, “Mastery is for the geniuses, the exceptionally talented, the freaks of nature. I was simply not born that way.” Or it says, “Mastery is ugly and immoral. It is for those who are ambitious and egotistical. Better to accept my lot in life and to work to help other people instead of enriching myself.” Or it might say, “Success is all luck. Those we call Masters are only people who were at the right place at the right time. I could easily be in their place if I had a lucky break.” Or it might also say, “To work for so long at something that requires so much pain and effort, why bother? Better to enjoy my short life and do what I can to get by.” As you must know by now, these voices do not speak the truth. Mastery is not a question of genetics or luck, but of following your natural inclinations and the deep desire that stirs you from within. Everyone has such inclinations. This desire within you is not motivated by egotism or sheer ambition for power, both of which are emotions that get in the way of mastery. It is instead a deep expression of something natural, something that marked you at birth as unique. In following your inclinations and moving toward mastery, you make a great contribution to society, enriching it with discoveries and insights, and making the most of the diversity in nature and among human society. It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures. Alienating yourself from your inclinations can only lead to pain and disappointment in the long run, and a sense that you have wasted something unique. This pain will beexpressed in bitterness and envy, and you will not recognize the true source of your depression.

The sea does not require to be recognized and neither falls into the rivers, nor it hinders, falling the rivers into it. Similarly, intellectuals, geniuses, and the sea of wisdom figures do not need and look for applause and appreciation, but they are naturally and automatically honored by those who feel and understand their wisdom and thoughts.

The sea doesn’t feel fear and danger, how long and how fast the rain falls.” “I try not to fight; however, I stay right, realizing insight.” “The hope is such a candle and light that prevents the darkness of despair.” “The sea does not require to be recognized and neither falls into the rivers, nor it hinders, falling the rivers into it. Similarly, intellectuals, geniuses, and the sea of wisdom figures do not need and look for applause and appreciation, but they are naturally and automatically honoured by those who feel and understand their wisdom and thoughts.” “It doesn’t bother me whether you are a male or a female if you stay civilized. Remember, crossing the limits and over-clearness do not work here. I hope you will take a dose of knowledge before you humiliate yourself.” “Why should I stay on Twitter if it restricts my voice? It is a Question for Twitter since one year ago, my writing and view approached significant impressions, whereas now only a few impacts exist. Is it not an attack on freedom of the press and speech?” “Money-monger means Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter, and such ones who put everything at risk, enjoying their life with/from working-class earnings.” The Deadly Silence *** I never became attractive, For anyone’s eyes I cried a lot At home and journey I am such a candle flame Which is about to turn off, You will find nothing In a dark house I have borne the journey, With constant pain My life stayed At a loss and worthless Carrying the burden of insight, Wisdom and courage What would I try When the deadly silence of destiny That has become my destination. --- “A candle cannot beat the Sun, nor the drops of rain defeat the Sea.

If you realize and accept your mistakes, faults, and wrongdoings, it is the only way to recognize, get, and find yourself. When it happens, you are a genius too.

For Murdoch, the essential immoral act9 is the inability to see other people correctly. Human beings, she finds, are self-centered beings, anxiety-ridden and resentful. We are constantly representing people to ourselves in self-serving ways, in ways that gratify our egos and serve our ends. We stereotype and condescend, ignore and dehumanize. And because we don’t see people accurately, we treat them wrongly. Evil happens when people are unseeing, when they don’t recognize the personhood in other human beings. By contrast, the essential moral act for Murdoch is being able to cast a “just and loving attention”10 on another person. “Love is knowledge of the individual,” she writes. That doesn’t mean you have to romantically swoon for everybody you meet. It means that a good person tries to look at everyone with a patient and discerning regard, tries to resist self-centeredness and overcome prejudice, in order to see another person more deeply and with greater discernment. The good person tries to cast a selfless attention and to see what the other person sees. This kind of attention leads to the greatness of small acts: welcoming a newcomer to your workplace, detecting anxiety in somebody’s voice and asking what’s wrong, knowing how to host a party so that everyone feels included. Most of the time, morality is about the skill of being considerate toward others in the complex situations of life. It’s about being a genius at the close at hand.

Yet as a teacher, I recognized that it was excessive fear and self-doubt that were the greatest detractors of personal genius. It broke my heart to see students know the answers, yet lack the courage to act on the answer. Often in the real world, it’s not the smart who get ahead, but the bold.

There is not a single woman that I can think of in this industry that is publicly labeled as a ‘visionary’ or a ‘genius. There are dozens and dozens of men in the country where those adjectives are used. Because we label men as geniuses and visionaries, we give them a lot more chances, we allow them to fail a lot more times, and we make excuses for things that we wouldn’t make excuses for, for women . . . Unless we change the public vernacular of how we lift up and recognize women and how we all give women the same sorts of chances . . . we are not going to see that change.

Everyone around us has equal dignity, and we can’t trample over it through a pursuit of power and control; in fact, we want to magnify the Lord so that others recognize their own dignity!

A true genius recognizes that if they’ve arrived at a conclusion there’s a good chance that they’ve yet to arrive.

Being a first-class noticer allows you to recognize talent, identify opportunities, and avoid pitfalls. Leaders who succeed again and again are geniuses at grasping context. This is one of those characteristics, like taste, that is difficult to break down into its component parts. But the ability to weigh a welter of factors, some as subtle as how very different groups of people will interpret a gesture, is one of the hallmarks of a true leader.

Being a first-class noticer allows you to recognize talent, identify opportunities, and avoid pitfalls. Leaders who succeed again and again are geniuses at grasping context. This is one of those characteristics, like taste, that is difficult to break down into its component parts. But the ability to weigh a welter of factors, some as subtle as how very different groups of people will interpret a gesture, is one of the hallmarks of a true leader.

What we will discover through the genius of Jesus is that for us to think most deeply, we must allow ourselves to feel most deeply. And this starts by recognizing the genius it takes to care deeply and care well for others.

Empathy doesn’t mean always having to say what you’re thinking, or making sure people understand your feelings every waking moment of your life. Empathy is driven not by a need to be understood, but by the power of understanding. Empathy is about recognizing what others need in that moment, and having both the wisdom and courage to bring it.

And they defeated the genius Napoleon and, suddenly recognizing him as a brigand, sent him to the island of St. Helena. And the exile, separated from the beloved France so dear to his heart, died a lingering death on that rock and bequeathed his great deeds to posterity. But in Europe a reaction occurred and the sovereigns once again all began to oppress their subjects.

It turns out that when people assess your skills, they put more weight on your peaks18 than on your troughs. Even if you happened to see Serena Williams repeatedly double-fault on her serve, you’d recognize her excellence if you witnessed just one of her aces. When Steve Jobs flopped with the Apple Lisa, people still deemed him a visionary for his feats with the Mac. And we judge Shakespeare’s genius by his masterpieces (think Hamlet and King Lear), forgiving his forgettable plays (I’m looking at you, Timon of Athens and The Merry Wives of Windsor). People judge your potential from your best moments, not your worst. What if you gave yourself the same grace?

They did this by (1) identifying what their customers wanted (to be seen and heard), (2) defining their customers’ challenge (that people didn’t recognize their hidden genius), and (3) offering their customers a tool they could use to express themselves (computers and smartphones). Each of these realizations are pillars in ancient storytelling and critical for connecting with customers.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, in order for a clinician to make an official diagnosis of NPD, a patient must present five or more of the following personality traits: He has a grandiose sense of self-importance (exaggerates accomplishments and demands to be considered superior without real evidence of achievement). He lives in a dream world of exceptional success, power, beauty, genius, or “perfect” love. He thinks of himself as “special,” or privileged, and that he can only be understood by other special or high-status people. He demands excessive amounts of praise or admiration from others. He feels entitled to automatic deference, compliance, or favorable treatment from others. He is exploitative toward others and takes advantage of them. He lacks empathy and does not recognize or identify with others’ feelings. He is frequently envious of others or thinks that they are envious of him. He has an attitude or frequently acts in haughty or arrogant ways.

The first woman in history to be recognized as a universal genius, Hypatia excelled in the fields of mathematics, philosophy, and astronomy. She was killed by a mob of religious fanatics.

We are not so narrowly defined as society would have us believe. Yet the limits placed on our appetites, talents, and potential are implanted in us when we are children—too young to recognize the prisons built with words. We could blame it all on our families, but then we’d never find the keys to unlock our cells. The awful genius of our confinement is that we are both the prisoner and the warden. We tell ourselves daily that we aren’t free to do this or that because we are that or this. To escape such limited thinking, we don’t have to look far. The keys are in our pocket.

Mindseed is one of the leading group of kindergarten schools that recognizes the fact that every child is a genius and we should celebrate them for who they are rather than pushing them for what we want them to become.

Southern Literary Messenger, that old Village denizen Edgar Allan Poe had made a different kind of prophetic guess. As an attempt pre-emptively to render redundant most of the nonsense that would be written about Dylan and poetry, it has not been bettered. There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few. In speaking of song-writing, I mean, of course, the composition of brief poems with an eye to their adaptation for music in the vulgar sense. In this ultimate destination of the song proper, lies its essence — its genius. It is the strict reference to music — it is the dependence upon modulated expression — which gives to this branch of letters a character altogether unique, and separates it, in great measure and in a manner not sufficiently considered, from ordinary literature; rendering it independent of merely ordinary proprieties; allowing it, and in fact demanding for it, a wide latitude of Law; absolutely insisting upon a certain wild license and indefinitiveness — an indefinitiveness recognized by every musician who is not a mere fiddler, as an important point in the philosophy of his science — as the soul, indeed, of the sensations derivable from its practice — sensations which bewilder while they enthral — and which would not so enthral if they did not so bewilder.

I shall keep my eyes fixed on the two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognize in them the living and conspicuous representatives of two worlds of art differing in their intrinsic essence and in their highest aims. I see Apollo as the transfiguring genius of the principium individuationis through which alone the redemption in illusion is truly to be obtained; while by the mystical triumphant cry of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being,1 to the innermost heart of things. This extraordinary contrast, which stretches like a yawning gulf between plastic art as the Apollinian, and music as the Dionysian art,2 has revealed itself to only one of the great thinkers, to such an extent that, even without this clue to the symbolism of the Hellenic divinities, he conceded to music a character and an origin different from all the other arts, because, unlike them, it is not a copy of the phenomenon, but an immediate copy of the will itself, and therefore complements everything physical in the world and every phenomenon by representing what is metaphysical, the thing in itself.

As Jonathan Swift wrote, a genius may be recognized by the fact that all the idiots unite against him. Example: Steve Jobs.

I used to love the saying, 'If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.' It sounds great, right? The only problem is that, as it turns out, it’s not even remotely true. Worse yet, it encourages people to passively wait for someone else to give them a break. Most people who do that will grow old waiting for someone to come along and recognize their genius.

ME, VERY INGENIOUSLY COVERING THE DIARY WITH FABRIC SO NO ONE WILL RECOGNIZE IT!! YES! I know! I’m a BEAUTIFUL GENIUS !! It took me TWO whole hours to cover the diary with the leopard-print fabric from my brand-new designer blouse. And when I finally finished, I was totally blown away by how FANTASTIC it looked. The entire experience was so exciting and inspiring that I actually started to sweat GLOW! That’s when I rushed right back to the mall (thank goodness it hadn’t closed

We permit a new future to enter the room with these startling encounters. A young boy from Austin, Texas, Charles Black Jr., stood and knew it when he was just sixteen years old, thinking he was going to a coed social at the Driskill Hotel in his hometown in 1931. It was a dance, the first in a session of four, yet he remained transfixed by an image that he had never seen before. The trumpet player, a jazz musician whom he had not heard of, performed largely with his eyes closed, sounding out notes, ideas, laments, sonnets, “that had never before existed,” he said. His music sounded like an “utter transcendence of all else created.” He was with a friend, a “ ‘good old boy’ from Austin High,” who sensed it too, and was troubled. It rumbled the ground underneath them. His friend stood a while longer, “shook his head as if clearing it,” as if prying himself out of the trance. But Charles Black Jr. was sure even then. The trumpeter, “Louis Armstrong, King of the Trumpet” as it turned out, “was the first genius I had ever seen,” Black said, and that genius was housed in the body of a man whom Black’s childhood world had denigrated. The moment was “solemn.” Black had been staring at “genius,” yes, “fine control over total power, all height and depth, forever and ever,” and also staring at the gulf created by “the failure to recognize kinship.” He felt that Armstrong, who played as if “guided by a Daemon,” all “power” and lyricism, “opened my eyes wide, and put to me a choice”—to keep to a small view of humanity or to embrace a more expanded vision—and once Black made that choice, he never turned back. This is what aesthetic force can do—create a clear line forward, and an alternate route to choose.

The Reformers laid special emphasis upon this element of faith. They were opposing the Romish view that faith is assent. It is quite consistent with Romish religion to say that faith is assent. It is the genius of the Romish conception of salvation to intrude mediators between the soul and the Savior — the church, the virgin, the sacraments. On the contrary, it is the glory of the gospel of God’s grace that there is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. And it was the glory of our Protestant Reformation to discover again the purity of the evangel. The Reformers recognized that the essence of saving faith is to bring the sinner lost and dead in trespasses and sins into direct personal contact with the Savior himself, contact which is nothing less than that of self-commitment to him in all the glory of his person and perfection of his work as he is freely and fully offered in the gospel.

The best minds come from the most unexpected faces and places. There is no image for intelligence or genius. Genius is something that cannot be seen. It cannot be produced or manufactured. It is something that even the true genius thinks is unattainable. The genius recognizes he’s just a small pea in a sea of infinite atoms. Knowledge is as infinite as the universe. The man who claims to know all, only reveals to all that he really knows nothing.

That threshold lying at the entrance to each man's and woman's life, I knew without equivocation now, must be recognized and genuflected before.

The best thing about talent is that you don't always need to showboat for others; you need to discover it for yourself and expand upon it by challenging yourself beyond your limits. Soon the world will witness your genius because true talent doesn't need to be shown to people, it is always recognized.

I truly believe that if they turned all the pianos in the world to firewood, he would throw himself on top of the bonfire. We have laughed together about how I am famous, not him. But we both know that I look much prettier in a dress than he does, that I play much more photogenically.... I am a "girl," and therefore more marketable. But I know that he is the genius, that he can take the Chopin Etudes and add a touch of magic, a spark, that makes them definitively his own. I also knew that one day the world will recognize this. And I will be happy to take second place. I'm sure my playing has gone from strength to strength because of him. And I adore him. He is my piano. He is my bonfire. And if he were no longer there, I would throw myself on top of that fire willingly.

A chef’s genius is not to create a dish from original ingredients, but to combine standard ingredients in original ways. The diner recognizes the pattern established in the foundation of a baked stuffed turkey, and we look for the variation, the twist that will surprise and delight

recognized that he was a genius" (67)

Recognize the connections of things and the laws of conduct of men so that you may know what you are doing.

But the truth about the need for heroism is not easy for anyone to admit, even the very ones who want to have their claims recognized. There's the rub. As we shall see from our subsequent discussion, to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life. Everything painful and sobering in what psychoanalytic genius and religious genius have discovered about man revolves around the terror of admitting what one is doing to earn his self-esteem. This is why human heroics is a blind drivenness that burns people up; in passionate people, a screaming for glory as uncritical and reflexive as the howling of a dog. In the more passive masses of mediocre men it is disguised as they humbly and complainingly follow out the roles that society provides for their heroics and try to earn their promotions within the system: wearing the standard uniforms-but allowing themselves to stick out, but ever so little and so safely, with a little ribbon or a red boutonniere, but now with head and shoulders.

Most recognized experts achieved success not because of some special genius, but because they learned how to put disparate elements together and present ideas in a new and meaningful way.

For the infinite player, seeing as genius, nature is the absolutely unlike. The infinite player recognizes nothing on the face of nature. Nature displays not only its indifference to human existence but its difference as well.

I know the world will not recognize my efforts, he said to himself, proud of being misunderstood. After all, that was the price every genius had to pay.

To speak, or act, or think originally is to erase the boundary of the self. It is to leave behind the territorial personality. A genius does not have a mind full of thoughts but is the thinker of thoughts, and is the center of a field of vision. It is a field of vision, however, that is recognized as a field of vision only when we see that it includes within itself the original centers of other fields of vision.

Genius, I have concluded, is the presence of not one ability but several that work together in tandem. Genius is far more tedious, far less romantic, far more rote, far less effortless, than we imagine it. The great writers in this book do not by and large put the right words on the right page in the right order on the first try. But in the place of perfection, they possess the quality of perseverance and a willingness to recognize their own shortcomings.

Curiosity is an important trait for geniuses,

Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority—where he may forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;—exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense. Whoever, in intercourse with men, does not occasionally glisten in all the green and grey colours of distress, owing to disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloominess, and solitariness, is assuredly not a man of elevated tastes; supposing, however, that he does not voluntarily take all this burden and disgust upon himself, that he persistently avoids it, and remains, as I said, quietly and proudly hidden in his citadel, one thing is then certain: he was not made, he was not predestined for knowledge. For as such, he would one day have to say to himself: "The devil take my good taste! but 'the rule' is more interesting than the exception—than myself, the exception!" And he would go DOWN, and above all, he would go "inside." The long and serious study of the AVERAGE man—and consequently much disguise, self-overcoming, familiarity, and bad intercourse (all intercourse is bad intercourse except with one's equals):—that constitutes a necessary part of the life-history of every philosopher; perhaps the most disagreeable, odious, and disappointing part. If he is fortunate, however, as a favourite child of knowledge should be, he will meet with suitable auxiliaries who will shorten and lighten his task; I mean so-called cynics, those who simply recognize the animal, the commonplace and "the rule" in themselves, and at the same time have so much spirituality and ticklishness as to make them talk of themselves and their like BEFORE WITNESSES—sometimes they wallow, even in books, as on their own dung-hill. Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach what is called honesty; and the higher man must open his ears to all the coarser or finer cynicism, and congratulate himself when the clown becomes shameless right before him, or the scientific satyr speaks out. There are even cases where enchantment mixes with the disgust—namely, whereby a freak of nature, genius is bound to some such indiscreet billy-goat and ape, as in the case of the Abbe Galiani, the profoundest, acutest, and perhaps also filthiest man of his century—he was far profounder than Voltaire, and consequently also, a good deal more silent. It happens more frequently, as has been hinted, that a scientific head is placed on an ape's body, a fine exceptional understanding in a base soul, an occurrence by no means rare, especially among doctors and moral physiologists. And whenever anyone speaks without bitterness, or rather quite innocently, of man as a belly with two requirements, and a head with one; whenever anyone sees, seeks, and WANTS to see only hunger, sexual instinct, and vanity as the real and only motives of human actions; in short, when any one speaks "badly"—and not even "ill"—of man, then ought the lover of knowledge to hearken attentively and diligently; he ought, in general, to have an open ear wherever there is talk without indignation. For the indignant man, and he who perpetually tears and lacerates himself with his own teeth (or, in place of himself, the world, God, or society), may indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more ordinary, more indifferent, and less instructive case. And no one is such a LIAR as the indignant man.

If I possess any genius whatsoever, it is found in recognizing that I am not a genius.

The genius of the Wright brothers wasn’t to invent every necessary component from flight from scratch, it was to recognize that we were only a stepping stone away from flight given past innovations.

recognize in these photographs the resilience, determination, and concern for the fate of humanity that these photographers possess. And I would ask you further to consider how integral to American Geography is the idea of an ensemble of work like this. While there is individual genius behind many of these pictures, it is the community of artists, the absence of overbearing individual sentiment, that stands out here.

When people say ‘This guy is crazy!’, I see people that cannot recognize genius.

The uniqueness of Iago, like the uniqueness of modern war, does not lie in the spirit of destruction. That has always been common enough. It lies in the genius he dedicates to destructive ends. Modern war would not recognize itself in the portraits of Shakespeare’s classical and feudal fighters, in Hector and Hotspur, in Faulconbridge and Coriolanus, or in Othello himself. But let it look in the glass and it will behold Iago. In him Shakespeare reveals , with clarity of nightmare, the unrestrained intellect, instead of being opposite of force, and an antidote for it, as much of the modern world thinks, is force functioning on a nother plane. It is the immoral equivalent of war, and as certain to clead to it in due seasons as Iago’s machinations were to lead to death. ‘All other knowledge is hurtful,’ says Montaigne, ‘to him who has not the science of honesty and goodness.

The uniqueness of Iago, like the uniqueness of modern war, does not lie in the spirit of destruction. That has always been common enough. It lies in the genius he dedicates to destructive ends. Modern war would not recognize itself in the portraits of Shakespeare’s classical and feudal fighters, in Hector and Hotspur, in Faulconbridge and Coriolanus, or in Othello himself. But let it look in the glass and it will behold Iago. In him Shakespeare reveals , with clarity of nightmare, the unrestrained intellect, instead of being opposite of force, and an antidote for it, as much of the modern world thinks, is force functioning on another plane. It is the immoral equivalent of war, and as certain to clead to it in due seasons as Iago’s machinations were to lead to death. “All other knowledge is hurtful,” says Montaigne, “to him who has not the science of honesty and goodness.

Mediocrity recognizes nothing higher than itself. It takes talent to appreciate genius.

The believers in the gold standard gave it the power of nature. They didn’t so much argue as simply took as given the fact that gold-as-money was the natural order of things, and that any other policy was not only unwise but also unnatural and therefore doomed to fail. Roosevelt recognized that there was nothing natural about the gold standard; it was as artificial as any other monetary arrangement. The gold standard was a choice people had made—even if they didn’t recognize it as a choice. Roosevelt’s great genius was simply to say: we can choose something else.

The first thing to look for in a genius is odd behavior. I was around 40 years old when I recognized my own oddity in character, and I was completely caught off guard by this transparency. I had been aware of my very difficult mental battles, such as OCD and Misophonia (though for several years I didn’t even know they were actual conditions), but I convinced myself that those were basically just issues that weren’t actually attached to my character. I thought that I could confine them to my private life, and that the world around me wouldn’t be able to detect them, and I convinced myself that the majority of others probably went through similar things. But I was wrong. My conditions were not normal, and I was not normal.

When Apple began filtering their communication to make it simple and relevant, they actually stopped featuring computers in most of their advertising. Instead, they understood their customers were all living, breathing heroes, and they tapped into their stories. They did this by (1) identifying what their customers wanted (to be seen and heard), (2) defining their customers’ challenge (that people didn’t recognize their hidden genius), and (3) offering their customers a tool they could use to express themselves (computers and smartphones). Each of these realizations are pillars in ancient storytelling and critical for connecting with customers.

Given the demonstrated benefits of interactivity, why do so many of us continue to solve problems with our heads alone? Blame our entrenched cultural bias in favor of brainbound thinking, which holds that the only activity that matters is purely mental in kind. Manipulating real-world objects in order to solve an intellectual problem is regarded as childish or uncouth; real geniuses do it in their heads. This persistent oversight has occasionally been the cause of some irritated impatience among those who do recognize the value of externalization and interactivity. There’s a classic story, for example, concerning the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, who was as well known for authoring popular books such as Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! as for winning the Nobel Prize (awarded to him and two colleagues in 1965). In a post-Nobel interview with the historian Charles Weiner, Weiner referred in passing to a batch of Feynman’s original notes and sketches, observing that the materials represented “a record of the day-to-day work” done by the physicist. Instead of simply assenting to Weiner’s remark, Feynman reacted with unexpected sharpness. “I actually did the work on the paper,” he said. “Well,” Weiner replied, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” Feynman wasn’t having it. “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?” Feynman wasn’t (just) being crotchety. He was defending a view of the act of creation that would be codified four decades later in Andy Clark’s theory of the extended mind. Writing about this very episode, Clark argues that, indeed, “Feynman was actually thinking on the paper. The loop through pen and paper is part of the physical machinery responsible for the shape of the flow of thoughts and ideas that we take, nonetheless, to be distinctively those of Richard Feynman.” We often ignore or dismiss these loops, preferring to focus on what goes on in the brain—but this incomplete perspective leads us to misunderstand our own minds. Writes Clark, “It is because we are so prone to think that the mental action is all, or nearly all, on the inside, that we have developed sciences and images of the mind that are, in a fundamental sense, inadequate.” We will “begin to see ourselves aright,” he suggests, only when we recognize the role of material things in our thinking—when we correct the errors and omissions of the brainbound perspective, and “put brain, body, and world together again.

[..] And here, suddenly, was Woolf's own talented sister. The one who survived. The sister who painted. My first thought was: how sad. What fate could be worse than to be in close proximity to genius, capable of recognizing it, but, alas, something less-than? And Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell must have been less-than, because I'd barely heard of her. How terrible, and sadly typical, that in my long pursuit of women artists I'd apparently learned nothing. Least of all, that they are all too easily lost to time, a condition rarely any reflection on their talent.

Just think about the incredible transformation that took place in Steve’s life and career after Pixar. In 1983, Apple launched their computer Lisa, the last project Jobs worked on before he was let go. Jobs released Lisa with a nine-page ad in the New York Times spelling out the computer’s technical features. It was nine pages of geek talk nobody outside NASA was interested in. The computer bombed. When Jobs returned to the company after running Pixar, Apple became customer-centric, compelling, and clear in their communication. The first campaign he released went from nine pages in the New York Times to just two words on billboards all over America: Think Different. When Apple began filtering their communication to make it simple and relevant, they actually stopped featuring computers in most of their advertising. Instead, they understood their customers were all living, breathing heroes, and they tapped into their stories. They did this by (1) identifying what their customers wanted (to be seen and heard), (2) defining their customers’ challenge (that people didn’t recognize their hidden genius), and (3) offering their customers a tool they could use to express themselves (computers and smartphones). Each of these realizations are pillars in ancient storytelling and critical for connecting with customers. I’ll teach you about these three pillars and more in the coming chapters, but for now just realize the time Apple spent clarifying the role they play in their customers’ story is one of the primary factors responsible for their growth. Notice, though, the story of Apple isn’t about Apple; it’s about you. You’re the hero in the story, and they play a role more like Q in the James Bond movies. They are the guy you go see when you need a tool to help you win the day.

The genius of Monte Carlo—and its search-engine descendants—lies in the ability to extract meaningful solutions, in the face of overwhelming information, by recognizing that meaning resides less in the data at the end points and more in the intervening paths.

Intellectual Fascism – 2/3 Take, by way of illustration, two well-educated, presumably liberal, intelligent people in our culture who are arguing with each other about some point. What, out of irritation and disgust, is one likely to call the other? A "filthy black," a "dirty Jew bastard," or a "black-eyed runt"? Heavens, no. But a "stupid idiot," a "nincompoop," a "misinformed numbskull"? By all means, yes. And will the note of venom, of utter despisement that is in the detractor's voice, be any different from that in the voice of the out-and-out fascist with his racial, religious, and political epithets? Honestly, now: will it? Suppose the individual against whom a well-educated, presumably liberal, intelligent person aims scorn actually is stupid, or misinformed. Is this a crime? Should he, perforce, curl up and die because he is so afflicted? Is she an utterly worthless, valueless blackguard for not possessing the degree of intelligence and knowledge that her detractor thinks she should possess? And yet - let us be ruthlessly honest with ourselves, now! - isn't this exactly what the presumably liberal person is saying and implying - that the individual whose traits she dislikes doesn't deserve to live? Isn't this what we (for it is not hard to recognize our own image here, is it?) frequently are alleging when we argue with, criticize, and judge others in our everyday living? The facts, in regard to higher-order fascism, are just as clear as those in regard to lower-order prejudice. For just as everyone in our society cannot be, except through the process of arbitrary genocide or "eugenic" elimination, Aryan, or tall, or white, so cannot everyone be bright, or artistically talented, or successful in some profession. In fact, even if we deliberately bred only higher intelligent and artistically endowed individuals to each other, and forced the rest of the human race to die off, we still would be far from obtaining a race of universal achievers: since, by definition, topflight achievement can only be attained by a relatively few leaders in most fields of endeavour, and is a "relative" rather than an "absolute" possibility. The implicit goals of intellectual fascism, then, are, at least in today's world, impractical and utopian. Everyone cannot be endowed with artistic or intellectual genius; only a small minority can be. And if we demand that all be in that minority, to what are we automatically condemning those who clearly cannot be? Obviously: to being blamed and despised for their "deficiencies"; to being lower-class citizens; to having self-hatred and minimal self-acceptance. Even this, however, hardly plumbs the inherent viciousness of intellectual fascism. For whereas lower-order or politico-economic fascism at least serves as a form of neurotic defensiveness for those who uphold its tenets, higher-order fascism fails to provide such defences and actually destroys them. Thus, politico-social fascists believe that others are to be despised for not having certain "desirable" traits - but that they are not to be applauded for having them. From a psychological standpoint, they compensate for their own underlying feelings of inadequacy by insisting that they are super-adequate and those who are not like them are subhumans. Intellectual Fascists start out with a similar assumption but more often than not get blown to bits by their own homemade explosives. For although they can at first assume that they are bright, talented, and potentially achieving, they must eventually prove that they are. Because, in the last analysis, they tend to define talent and intelligence in terms of concrete achievement, and because outstanding achievement in our society is mathematically restricted to a few, they rarely can have real confidence in their own possession of the values they have "arbitrarily deified".

One of his chief strengths was his ability to observe, assimilate and then reinterpret,” said Dez Dickerson, who played guitar with Prince from 1979 to 1983. “So, with every engineer he worked with, he was observing and assimilating recording techniques. He was also observing and assimilating songwriting techniques and stuff that was freely happening inside the band. And all of that influenced him and he became a shape-shifter—he became great at assimilating these techniques and reinterpreting them in a way people didn’t recognize. And that became the genius of Prince.

But from the larger perspective—obviously the more important one, given Coughran's mandate—it was indeed about integration: valuable ideas were developed by the team whose ideas weren't used right away in the next storage system. But Coughran recognized their potential value and made sure they remained in consideration for solutions even further down the road.

That’s exactly what a gaslighter wants. They need you to see them as a guide through life, a professional to hold your hand as you stumble along. This experience makes the narcissist drunk with power. They will see themselves as a genius, able to string along partners so they will do whatever they say, whenever they give the command.

True genius recognizes that we are not.

These temperaments were described by the early-twentieth-century German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer, the first modern researcher on abnormal personality, who also noted the link between insanity and genius. He recognized the benefit of a little mental abnormality, either in “the initial stages” of severe mental illness, or in “mild, borderline states of mental disease,” which is what I mean by abnormal personalities or temperaments. If we removed the insanity from these people, Kretschmer said, we would convert their genius into merely ordinary talent. Insanity is not a “regrettable . . . accident” but the “indispensable catalyst” of genius.

The sea does not require to be recognized, and neither it falls into the rivers, nor it hinders falling the rivers into it. Similarly, intellectuals, genius and the sea of wisdom figures do not need and look for applauses and appreciations, but they are naturally and automatically honoured by those, who feel and understand their wisdom and thoughts.

By this time, Abigail was signing herself “Diana,” using a fanciful classical name, as young women were wont to do in her time. This Diana, however, alive in Weymouth, was not the chaste virgin goddess of the hunt but eighteen years old and betrothed to a man who was given to huge passions. She saw only his greatness, recognized his genius, and was drawn to his brilliant talk as well as the energy that matched her own eagerness to engage with life.

I love how working-class, femme, and disabled this care labor is. I just want it to also not be seen as an automatic expectation of any femme at any time! I want some rules so we don’t feel drained, exhausted, and fucked over. I want it to be a choice. And I want its next-level genius of skill to be recognized. This is skilled labor!

He would survive working with Helen Watt—even as the thought occurred to him, he recognized it as a stroke of genius—by pretending she was a different sort of person. He would act as though she were a woman with a sense of humor.

glory, at the Science Museum of London. Charles Babbage was a well-known scientist and inventor of the time. He had spent years working on his Difference Engine, a revolutionary mechanical calculator. Babbage was also known for his extravagant parties, which he called “gatherings of the mind” and hosted for the upper class, the well-known, and the very intelligent.4 Many of the most famous people from Victorian England would be there—from Charles Darwin to Florence Nightingale to Charles Dickens. It was at one of these parties in 1833 that Ada glimpsed Babbage’s half-built Difference Engine. The teenager’s mathematical mind buzzed with possibilities, and Babbage recognized her genius immediately. They became fast friends. The US Department of Defense uses a computer language named Ada in her honor. Babbage sent Ada home with thirty of his lab books filled with notes on his next invention: the Analytic Engine. It would be much faster and more accurate than the Difference Engine, and Ada was thrilled to learn of this more advanced calculating machine. She understood that it could solve even harder, more complex problems and could even make decisions by itself. It was a true “thinking machine.”5 It had memory, a processor, and hardware and software just like computers today—but it was made from cogs and levers, and powered by steam. For months, Ada worked furiously creating algorithms (math instructions) for Babbage’s not-yet-built machine. She wrote countless lines of computations that would instruct the machine in how to solve complex math problems. These algorithms were the world’s first computer program. In 1840, Babbage gave a lecture in Italy about the Analytic Engine, which was written up in French. Ada translated the lecture, adding a set of her own notes to explain how the machine worked and including her own computations for it. These notes took Ada nine months to write and were three times longer than the article itself! Ada had some awesome nicknames. She called herself “the Bride of Science” because of her desire to devote her life to science; Babbage called her “the Enchantress of Numbers” because of her seemingly magical math

If you realize and accept your mistakes, faults, and wrongdoings, it is the exact way, to recognizing, getting and finding yourself when it happens, you are a genius person too

Bush changed national research the same way Vail changed corporate research. Both recognized that the big ideas—the breakthroughs that change the course of science, business, and history—fail many times before they succeed. Sometimes they survive through the force of exceptional skill and personality. Sometimes they survive through sheer chance. In other words, the breakthroughs that change our world are born from the marriage of genius and serendipity. The magic of Bush and Vail was in engineering the forces of genius and serendipity to work for them rather than against them. Luck is the residue of design.

After the jolt from Du Vair on 28 June, a second thunderbolt struck at the heart of the League and the meeting of the Estates less than a month later: Henry IV abjured his Calvinist faith and recognized the Catholic religion as the true church of God at St Denis on 25 July 1593. In an orchestrated move that showed his political genius, Henry IV eliminated at a stroke the raison d’eˆtre of the Estates-General and dissolved the one unifying thread that had held the League together since 1588.

After the jolt from Du Vair on 28 June, a second thunderbolt struck at the heart of the League and the meeting of the Estates less than a month later: Henry IV abjured his Calvinist faith and recognized the Catholic religion as the true church of God at St Denis on 25 July 1593. In an orchestrated move that showed his political genius, Henry IV eliminated at a stroke the raison d’etre of the Estates-General and dissolved the one unifying thread that had held the League together since 1588.

I looked still more closely -- and indeed, underneath the ear something was moving, something pitifully small and wretched and slender. And, no doubt of it, the tremendous ear was attached to a small, thin stalk -- but this stalk was a human being! If one used a magnifying glass one could even recognize a tiny envious face; also, that a bloated little soul was dangling from the stalk. The people, however, told me that this great ear was not only a human being, but a great one, a genius.

It is absolutely from his vision of the whole, in which the genius always lives, that he gets his sense of the parts. He values everything within him or without him by the standard of this vision, a vision that for him is no function of time, but a part of eternity. . . . The scientist takes phenomena for what they obviously are; the great man or the genius for what they signify. Sea and mountain, light and darkness, spring and autumn, cypress and palm, dove and swan are symbols to him, he not only thinks that there is, but he recognizes in them something deeper. The ride of the Valkyrie is not produced by atmospheric pressure and the magic fire is not the outcome of a process of oxidation. And all this is possible for him because the outer world is as full and strongly connected as the inner in him, the external world in fact seems to be only a special aspect of his inner life; the universe and the ego have become one in him, and he is not obliged to set his experience together piece by piece according to rule. . . .The infinity of the universe is responded to in the genius by a true sense of infinity in his own breast; he holds chaos and cosmos, all details and all totality, all plurality, and all singularity in himself.

If Travis had access to classified information, maybe that’s how he found out something about Ellena.” Miranda’s voice tightened with excitement. “And it was something so awful, something she felt so threatened by, she was willing to kill herself over it.” Parker shot each of the girls a mock scowl. “Women. What can I say? They can’t be trusted. They end up breaking your heart. All of them are traitors.” “Oh my God,” Miranda mumbled. “Parker…oh my God…” Traitor. It was only a word…but suddenly she knew. “Parker, you are brilliant!” Parker lifted clasped hands toward heaven. “It’s a miracle! Somebody who finally recognizes my genius!” “She was a spy!” Straightening in her seat, Miranda gripped the edge of the table, her eyes going wide. “Don’t you see? That’s why she drank the poison--she knew that if she didn’t, she’d be hanged. Ellena Rose--Miss Ellena--she was a Yankee spy.

The problem with computers," she said, "is that they can't forget things. They can't generalize. You recognize my face, not because you have an exact mapping of it in three-dimensions, but because you unconsciously forget all the parts that don't matter and hang on to those tiny bits that do. You couldn't articulate what it is about my face that makes it unique, but your brain knows.

Human intellects make sense of things and, if anything, err on the side of coherence. Geniuses of my acquaintance, who almost seem clever enough to make sense of the world if they so wished, are more likely to accept it as a muddle than the common man who invests it with a transcendent character of its own or recognizes it as filled with divine purpose in which nothing is out of place. Pluralism and chaos are harder to grasp – harder, perhaps, to understand and certainly to accept – than monism and order. For a whole society to accept an agreed world-picture as senseless, random and intractable, people seem to need a lot of collective disillusionment, accumulated and transmitted over many generations (see here). Moral and cognitive ambiguities are luxuries we allow ourselves which most of our forebears eschewed. Whether from an historical angle of approach, along which reconstruction is attempted of the thought of the earliest sages we know about, or from an anthropological direction, lined with examples from primitive societies which survived long enough to be scrutinized, early world-pictures seem remarkably systematic, like the ‘dreamtime’ of Australian aboriginals, in which the inseparable tissue of all the universe was spun. The ambitions these images embody betray the inclusive and comprehensive minds which made them. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ethnographers’ fieldwork seemed ever to be stumbling on confusedly atomized world-pictures, shared by people who reached for understanding with frenzied clutchings but no overall grasp. This was because anthropologists of the time had a progressive model of human development in mind: animism preceded polytheism, which preceded monotheism; magic preceded religion, which preceded science. Confusion came first and categories, schemes and systems came later. People of the forest saw trees before they inferred wood. Coherence, it was assumed, is constructed late in human history. It now seems that the opposite is true. Coherence-seeking is one of those innate characteristics that make human thought human. No people known to modern anthropology is without it. ‘One of the deepest human desires’, Isaiah Berlin has said, ‘is to find a unitary pattern in which the whole of experience is symmetrically ordered.’ Two kinds of coherence seem to come easily to primitive cosmogonists: they can be called, for convenience, binarism and monism. (For binarism, ‘dualism’ is a traditional name, but this word is now used with so many mutually incompatible meanings that it is less confusing to coin a new term.) Binarism envisages a cosmos regulated by the flow or balance between two conflicting or complementary principles. Monism imagines an indivisibly cohesive universe; the first a twofold, the second an unfolded cosmos. Equilibrium and cohesion are the characteristics of the world in what we take to be its oldest descriptions: equilibrium is the nature of a binarist description, cohesion of a monist one. Truth, for societies which rely on these characterizations for their understanding of the world, is what contributes to equilibrium or participates in cohesion. They

Albert Einstein’s breakthrough theories on the nature of the universe made him the most famous “genius” of all time. Somehow, he had the ability to see what no one else could, to unravel mysteries that most others hadn’t even considered. His antipathy for authority allowed him to see through the haze of the “settled science,” and his childlike curiosity compelled him to continue searching for answers to these incomprehensible mysteries. But how was he so smart? Did he develop his analytical powers through diligent effort? It’s hard to fathom a level of genius like Albert Einstein’s, so it’s too easy to conclude he must have just been born with a special brain. Perhaps he was, we can’t know. But even so, not every seed sprouts. A child born with a misshaped head, slow to speak, and prone to violent temper tantrums, could have been written off before his abilities were ever recognized. He could have been mislabeled — and then lived up (or “down”?) to this label. What would we label a child who can’t pay attention in school, argues with the teacher, refuses to follow instructions, does poorly in most of his classes, and can’t remember his lessons? Fortunately though, for Albert Einstein — and the world — his loving, patient parents consistently endeavored to support and encourage their son’s exceptional independence and curiosity.

geniuses and make us aware of the work of geniuses; the question arises: How was it that such simple and unselfconscious societies could spontaneously recognize and respond to something as complex and unpredictable and unique as a genius – when our much more prosperous and complex society cannot? The reason is just that most human societies of the past, and certainly those societies where genius most thrived, were serious; they recognized that life is a serious business, that there is a reason for it all, a purpose to it all, and (in those societies where genius was most prevalent) that each person had a part to play – by contrast, at least in mainstream public discourse, modern Western society does not acknowledge any of this.

the “10,000 hour” rule. The rule’s premise is that, regardless of whether one has an innate aptitude for an activity or not, mastery of it takes around ten thousand hours of focused, intentional practice. Analyzing the lives of geniuses in a wide range of intellectual, artistic, and athletic pursuits confirms this concept. From Mozart to Bobby Fischer to Bill Gates to the Beatles, their diverse journeys from nothing toward excellence in their respective fields shared a common denominator: the accumulation of ten thousand hours of unwavering “exercise” of their crafts. To put that number in perspective, if you practiced an activity four hours per day, seven days per week, it would take you about seven years to reach ten thousand hours. That kind of dedication can only come from the heart—a true love and passion for the activity. So, what does all this tell us? First, that the seed of greatness exists in every human being. Whether it sprouts or not is our choice. Second, that there are no such things as natural-born under- or overachievers—there are simply people that tap into their true potentials and people that don’t. What is generally recognized as “great talent” is, in almost all cases, nothing more than the outward manifestations of an unwavering dedication to a process.

Legislatures: "The fluctuating and ... multitudinous composition of [a popularly elected legislature] forbid us to expect in it those qualities which are essential to ... [the formation of treaties]. Accurate and comprehensive knowledge of foreign politics; a steady and systematic adherence to the same views; a nice and uniform sensibility to national character; decision, secrecy, and despatch, are incompatible with the genius of a body so variable and numerous." — Alexander Hamilton, 1788 Legislatures, belligerent nationalism of: "Parliaments are usually more nationalistic and belligerent than executives, and people than parliaments, because they are less aware of the risks." — Quincy Wright, 1955 (See also Amb. Freeman's remark on domestic climate of the US in June 2025: I think if I were a foreign ambassador in Washington, asked to analyze that question [who's in charge of foreign policy], I would make a number of comments. First I think the United States is in a pre-revolutionary situation. There's widespread dissatisfaction: the laws are being broken, the legitimacy of the government is in question, the operation of the federal system is broken, the policy process is chaotic. And as Alastair [Crooke] indicated, well, you go back to the federalist papers, one of them — I think written by Alexander Hamilton — argues very cogently that the legislature should not be in charge of foreign policy, because of the fickle nature of legislative decisions. This should be a matter of discretion, primarily for the president, and the constitution does give the president primary authority in foreign affairs. It's his decision whether to recognize a country or not, whether to receive foreign emissaries or not, to appoint ambassadors subject to the advice and consent of the Senate. And our constitutional system is not functioning on many, many levels. So of course everybody abroad is confused. Excerpt from interview "AMB. Charles Freeman : Israel Destroying Itself.")

Though Miller adored this scene, he focused on a more subtle one that he believed elevated the film to greatness. The sequence comes early on, when Lime’s melancholy lover, Anna, visits the apartment of the supposedly dead Lime. Sitting alone in his bedroom, she picks up a ringing telephone. While talking on the phone, she unconsciously opens a drawer, takes out two dice and instinctively rolls them. These unsensational few moments capture the intimate nature of Anna’s relationship with Lime that words would have labored to explain. It was a stroke of genius that I would never have recognized were it not for Miller.

This decision did not sit well with the French, however, who continued to recognize their own Paris Observatory meridian, a little more than two degrees east of Greenwich, as the starting line for another twenty-seven years, until 1911. (Even then, they hesitated to refer directly to Greenwich mean time, preferring the locution “Paris Mean Time, retarded by nine minutes twenty-one seconds.”)

As a teacher, I recognized that it was excessive fear and self-doubt that were the greatest detractors of personal genius. It broke my heart to see students know the answers, yet lack the courage to act on the answer.” “Old ideas are some people’s biggest liability. It is a liability simply because they fail to realize that while that idea or way of doing something was an asset yesterday, yesterday is gone.” “Rich people are often creative and take calculated risks.” “Why would you want to increase your financial intelligence? Because you want to be the kind of person who creates your own luck.” “The single most powerful asset we all have is our mind. If it is trained well, it can create enormous wealth seemingly instantaneously. An untrained mind can also create extreme poverty that can crush a family for generations.” “If the opportunity is too complex and I do not understand the investment, I don’t do it. Simple math and common sense are all you need to do well financially.” “The problem with ‘secure’ investments is that they are often sanitized, that is, made so safe that the gains are less.” “It is not gambling if you know what you’re doing. It is gambling if you’re just throwing money into a deal and praying.” “Great opportunities are not seen with your eyes. They are seen with your mind.

But make no mistake, the admissions of his shortcomings weren’t an apology. Rather, they seemed to raise his stature: a genius who recognized his deficiencies. Somehow, by acknowledging his mistakes, Adam moved them to the credit side of the ledger.

A little reflection will convince the aspirant how firmly held he is within the form of the personal self, of the mind with its opinions and views, its reasonings, and its continuous subjection to the influence and agitation of the sense life, if he recalls those rare moments which come when the mind is carried beyond itself into momentary contact with the life of the soul under the inspiration of the word or action of genius in the world of literature, music, or art. Then it is that, for a brief moment, soul speaks to soul, recognizes its own true nature expressed in others, and realizes its own possibilities.

The willing disbelief of people can carry on for a long time, but eventually it is overwhelmed by the market. The genius of Soros was recognizing the turning point when things change—the ability to not only know that a position was right, but that it was right now, and that now was the time to have a big risk on the trade.