Daily Inspiration Quote by Fritz Kreisler

Calling “genius” overused is a neat bit of gatekeeping that doubles as confession. Fritz Kreisler, the violinist-composer whose playing helped define early 20th-century musical taste, isn’t just arguing semantics; he’s policing a culture of applause. In an era when virtuosos were marketed like marvels and recordings began freezing performance into repeatable “perfection,” “genius” became a convenient stamp for audiences, critics, and promoters hungry for myth. Kreisler pushes back by shrinking the label to near-vanishing point: “about a half dozen.” That exaggeration is the joke and the moral at once. If genius is that rare, then most of what we celebrate is something else: craft, style, charisma, discipline, perhaps even luck.

The real maneuver is the last line: “I got only fairly near.” It’s self-deprecation with a sharp edge. Kreisler was famous enough to afford humility without losing status; modesty here becomes authority. He can demote himself because his reputation will survive it, and because the demotion subtly upgrades his taste. He’s telling you he knows the difference between acclaim and the kind of creative inevitability we reserve for Mozart or Beethoven. It’s also a defense against the anxiety of influence: to admit you’re not in the pantheon is to free yourself from competing with it.

Subtext: stop inflating compliments until they mean nothing. Praise the work, but don’t turn every great artist into a saint. Kreisler’s wink is that “fairly near” is still astonishingly close.