Genius Quotes

The true genius is a mind of large general powers accidentally determined to some particular direction.

The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede - not because they have a hundred feet but because most people can't count above fourteen.

G. C. Lichtenberg

Too often we forget that genius ... depends upon the data within its reach that Archimedes could not have devised Edison's inventions.

Ernest Dimnet

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

Genius is only great patience.

Anonymous

Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.

Thomas Alva Edison

Genius does what it must and talent does what it can.

Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Gift like genius I often think only means an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Ellice Hopkins

Genius is a promontory jutting out of the infinite.

Victor Hugo

Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.

James Russell Lowell

The lamp of genius burns quicker than the lamp of life.

Friedrich von Schiller

The poet's scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. The Genius survives all else is claimed by death.

Edmund Spenser

Genius as such can neither be explained nor treated away only at times its delay and inhibition and its perversion to destructive or self-destructive ends.

Erik Erikson

To believe your own thought to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Doing easily what others find is difficult is talent doing what is impossible for talent is genius.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

It takes immense genius to represent simply and sincerely what we see in front of us.

Edmond Duranty

Results! Why man I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.

Thomas A. Edison

The parting genius is with sighing sent.

Anonymous

Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Robert S. Lund

In the republic of mediocrity genius is dangerous.

Robert G. Ingersoll

We define genius as the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.

Bernard Berenson

Before I was a genius I was a drudge.

Ignace Jan Paderewski

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Genius develops in quiet places character out in the full current of human life.

Goethe

Men of genius are the worst possible models for men of talent.

Murray D. Edwards

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Oscar Wilde

When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

Jonathan Swift

Talent is that which is in a man's power genius is that in whose power a man is.

James Russell Lowell

There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Oscar Levant

Improvement makes straight roads but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.

William Blake

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

W.H. Auden

Everyone is a genius at least once a year a real genius has his original ideas closer together.

G. C. Lichtenberg

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

Anonymous

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Pablo Picasso

Genius in truth means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

William James

Write the masterpiece that has not been written.Sing the masterpiece that has not been sung.Paint the masterpiece that has not been painted.Create the masterpiece that has not been created.

Matshona Dhliwayo

A diamond is just another stone to one who is ignorant of its value.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Almost all genius up to now was one-sided—the result of a sickly constitution. One type had too much sense of the external, the other too much inner sense. Seldom could nature achieve a balance between the two—a complete constitution of genius. Often a perfect proportion arose by chance, but this could never endure because it was not comprehended and fixed by the spirit—they remained fortunate moments. The first genius that penetrated itself found here the exemplary germ of an immeasurable world. It made a discovery which must have been the most remarkable in the history of the world—for with it there begins a whole new epoch for humanity—and true history of all kinds becomes possible for the first time at this stage—for the way that had been traversed hitherto now makes up a proper whole that can be entirely elucidated. That point outside the world is given, and now Archimedes can fulfill his promise.

Novalis

If people fully understand you, they will think of you as a normal, if they half understand you, will think of you as a genius, and when they can't understand, will certainly think of you a stupid.

M.F. Moonzajer

Clever man is a chicken; it can fly, but a little. Genius, on the other hand, is a migratory bird; it can fly at high altitudes until He disappears on the horizon!

Mehmet Murat ildan

She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind.

Andrea Dworkin

If it weren't for acid, you might not have an IPod, and you definitely would not have some of the best music in your IPod.

Bill Maher

Intelligence and common sense, what makes a person a real genius.

Wazim Shaw

Philosophy is to the mind of the architect as eyesight to his steps. The Term 'genius' when applied to him simply means a man who understands what others only know about. A poet, artist or architect, necessarily 'understands' in this sense and is likely, if not careful, to have the term 'genius' applied to him; in which case he will no longer be thought human, trustworthy or companionable. Whatever may be his medium of expression he utters truth with manifest beauty of thought. If he is an architect, his building is natural. In him, philosophy and genius live by each other, but the combination is subject to popular suspicion and appellation 'genius' likely to settle him--so far as the public is concerned.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Genius: Range of mind, power of imagination, and responsiveness of soul: this is genius. The man of genius has a soul with greater range, can therefore be struck by the feelings of all beings, is concerned with everything in nature, and never receives an idea that does not evoke a feeling. Everything stirs him and everything is retained within him.When the soul has been moved by an object itself, it is even more affected by the memory of the object. But in a man of genius imagination goes further: it recalls ideas with a more vivid feeling than it received them, because to these ideas are connected a thousand others more appropriate to arouse the feeling.

Jean-François de Saint-Lambert

Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midwife to genius, but if I have not facilitated,I have at least not, as many women might have done, prevented. This is a very small virtue to claim, a very negative achievement to hang my whole life on.

A.S. Byatt

It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12,13,14, and 15) which over fifty years, created and expanded the the audience of listeners to the quartets of Beethoven, thus achieving, as all masterpieces do, progress if not in the quality of artists, at least in the company of minds, which is largely composed these days of what was missing when the work appeared: people capable of liking it.

Marcel Proust

Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day.

Samuel Goldwyn

If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice.

John Steinbeck

What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. 'Librarian' - that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between 'libido' and 'licentious' - it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books. - p.113

Miles Harvey

Genius is always accompanied by enthusiasm.

Bryant McGill

There is no gap as wide as the one between mediocrity and genius.

Rutvik Oza

A true genius is my brother, for his ability to measure and adapt his imagination to knowledge is unbounded. He can turn laziness into tactics. He can drop tactics for strategy without anyone or anything realizing it. He can comprehend grand principles of creation effortlessly and flawlessly. His capacity for knowledge surpasses even my own, and it's not because he constantly takes steps forward. It's because he has unconsciously taught himself to understand the principles behind possibility and nothingness. That is a true genius.

Lionel Suggs

Geniuses are those who have the intelligence, enthusiasm, and endurance to acquire the needed expertise in a broadly valued domain of achievement and who then make contributions to that field that are considered by peers to be both original and highly exemplary.

Dean Keith Simonton

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

Terry Pratchett

I went to some classes. Vampire was in the Hair of Magical Magic Creatures. He looked all depressed because Draco had disappeared and he had used to be in love with Draco. He was sucking some blood from a Hufflepuff.

Tara Gilesbie

A man's genius seems to befriend the more when he reads with open heart, the masterpiece of masterminds, the sagacity of sages, and the ingenious words of geniuses of ages.

Ogwo David Emenike

A man who is morally clean, other things being equal, has in every instance, greater agility, greater capacity, and greater endurance by far than the man who is not. While the latter is wasting his creative energies in useless pleasures, as well as in disease producing habits, the former is turning all of his creative energy into ability and genius, and the result is evident.

Christian D. Larson

1 2 3 … 12 Next

Genius Quotes

Related Topics