Innovators and creators are persons who can to a higher degree than average accept the condition of aloneness. They are more willing to follow their own vision, even when it takes them far from the mainland of the human community. Unexplored places do not frighten them- or not, at any rate, as much as they frighten those around them. This is one of the secrets of their power. That which we call "genius" has a great deal to do with courage and daring, a great deal to do with nerve.
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The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays read more
The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.
...originality consists of the achievement of new combinations, and not of the creation of something out of nothing.
...originality consists of the achievement of new combinations, and not of the creation of something out of nothing.
The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so.
The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so.
Ignorance and superstition ever bear a close and mathematical relation to each other.
Ignorance and superstition ever bear a close and mathematical relation to each other.
We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical read more
We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs inordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.
The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera- a small minority that read more
The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera- a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not apprehended at all.
We envy those whose possessions or achievements are a reflection on our own. They are our neighbors and equals. It read more
We envy those whose possessions or achievements are a reflection on our own. They are our neighbors and equals. It is they, above all who make plain the nature of our failure.
To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest...The greater read more
To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest...The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.
Reason is the main resource of man in his struggle for survival.
Reason is the main resource of man in his struggle for survival.
