Quotes and Sayings about Genius
"A genius is one who can do anything except make a living."
- Joey Lauren Adams
(Related: Genius, Living)
"Genius is sorrow's child."
- John Adams
(Related: Genius, Sorrow)
"Genius is the talent for seeing things straight."
- Maude Adams
(Related: Talent, Genius)
"Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn."
- Joseph Addison
(Related: Genius, Books, Mankind, Posterity)
"Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them."
- Joseph Addison
(Related: Men, Genius, Learning, Pearls, Want)
"If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius."
- Joseph Addison
(Related: Experience, Life, Brother, Genius, Friend, Hope, Perseverance, Caution, Succeed)
"This was Shakespeare's form; who walked in every path of human life, felt every passion; and to all mankind doth now, will ever, that experience yield which his own genius only could acquire."
- Mark Akenside
(Related: Experience, Life, Genius, Mankind, Now, Passion, Shakespeare, Will, Yield)
"To understand Europe, you have to be a genius - or French."
- Madeleine Albright
(Related: Genius, Europe)
"It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women."
- Louisa May Alcott
(Related: Men, Time, Women, Talent, Genius, People, Difference)
"You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty."
- Louisa May Alcott
(Related: Power, Talent, Genius, Charm, Conceit, Danger, Gifts, Goodness, Modesty, Will)
"Conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long; even if it is, the consciousness of possessing and using it well should satisfy one, and the great charm of all power is modesty."
- Louisa May Alcott
(Related: Power, Talent, Genius, Charm, Conceit, Consciousness, Danger, Goodness, Modesty, Will)
"To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius; a vital appropriating exercise of mind closely allied to that which first created it."
- William R. Alger
(Related: Genius, Exercise, First, Maxim, Mind)
"To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius."
- Henri Frederic Amiel
(Related: Talent, Genius)
"Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius."
- Henri Frederic Amiel
(Related: Talent, Genius)
"Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated. Begin, and then the work will be completed."
- Jean Anouilh
(Related: Work, Power, Genius, Boldness, Magic, Mind, Will)
"A genius knows how to make himself easily understood without being obvious about it."
- Jean Anouilh
(Related: Genius, Being, Obvious)
"To know one's self is wisdom, but not to know one's neighbors is genius."
- Minna Antrim
(Related: Wisdom, Genius, Neighbors, Self)
"The function of genius is to furnish cretins with ideas twenty years later."
- Louis Aragon
(Related: Genius, Ideas, Years)
"We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later."
- Louis Aragon
(Related: Nature, Genius, Ideas, Idiots, Years)
"There is no great genius without a mixture of madness."
- Aristotle
(Related: Genius, Madness)
"There was never a genius without a tincture of madness."
- Aristotle
(Related: Genius, Madness)
"No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness."
- Aristotle
(Related: Genius, Madness)
"There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him."
- Antonin Artaud
(Related: Life, Genius, People, Idea, Solution)
"Well, you cannot think of cinema now, and you cannot think of cinema in the UK and not place Chaplin in the most extraordinary elevated context, if there can be such a thing, in that he was a genius, he was unique."
- Richard Attenborough
(Related: Genius, Cinema, Now)
"A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull."
- Louis Auchincloss
(Related: Genius, Danger, Literary, Will)
"Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do."
- W. H. Auden
(Related: Want)
"Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely."
- Marcus Aurelius
(Related: Imagination, Genius, Reason, Understanding)
"Surely, if knowledge is valuable, it can never be good policy in a country far wealthier than Tuscany, to allow a genius like Mr. Dalton's, to be employed in the drudgery of elementary instruction."
- Charles Babbage
(Related: Genius, Policy, Knowledge, Country)
"The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs."
- Francis Bacon
(Related: Genius, Nation, Spirit, Wit)
"From the naturalistic point of view, all men are equal. There are only two exceptions to this rule of naturalistic equality: geniuses and idiots."
- Mikhail Bakunin
(Related: Men, Idiots)
"Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it."
- J. G. Ballard
(Related: Genius, Fool)
"The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human."
- Honore De Balzac
(Related: Genius, Action, Man, Mind)
"In Mozart and Salieri we see the contrast between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does what it can."
- Maurice Baring
(Related: Talent, Genius, Contrast)
"Genius is childhood recalled at will."
- Charles Baudelaire
(Related: Genius, Childhood, Will)
"Marriage requires a special talent, like acting. Monogamy requires genius."
- Warren Beatty
(Related: Marriage, Talent, Genius, Acting)
"Because you are a great lord, you believe yourself to be a great genius. You took the trouble to be born, but no more."
- Pierre Beaumarchais
(Related: Genius, Trouble)
"When my nephew was 3 and 4, he would say the most genius things. He said, You're hammer macho with FBI dogs. I thought it was just one of those great lines."
- Beck
(Related: Genius, Thought, Dogs)
"I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere."
- Beck
(Related: Genius, Artist, Hair)
"I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him."
- Max Beerbohm
(Related: Genius, Gods, Affliction, Man, Spiritual)
"Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up."
- Max Beerbohm
(Related: Men, Genius, People, Character, Deep, Instinct, Judges, Quick, Thinking)
"Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age."
- Clive Bell
(Related: Age, Genius, Worship)
"Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training."
- Bernard Berenson
(Related: Genius, Training)
"Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Genius, Humanity)
"This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time."
- Aneurin Bevan
(Related: Time, Genius, Fish)
"The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage."
- Aneurin Bevan
(Related: Genius)
"Genius - to know without having learned; to draw just conclusions from unknown premises; to discern the soul of things."
- Ambrose Bierce
(Related: Genius, Soul)
"Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius."
- Josh Billings
(Related: Genius, Common sense, Instinct)
"Genius ain't anything more than elegant common sense."
- Josh Billings
(Related: Genius, Common sense)
"As far as me knowing if Frank was a genius - in those days, I thought Einstein was the only genius around."
- Jimmy Carl Black
(Related: Genius, Thought)
"The only way you can get good, unless you're a genius, is to copy. That's the best thing. Just steal."
- Ritchie Blackmore
(Related: Genius)
"Of all the projects I've worked on, I've never worked with another director like Billy Friedkin. I think he's a genius."
- Linda Blair
(Related: Genius, Projects)
"Action, so to speak, is the genius of nature."
- Robert Blair
(Related: Nature, Genius, Action)
"Many now born, by the time they are voters will compose part of a nation with a genius nowhere equaled, and with a vast territory upon which those energies and that genius can operate."
- Richard Parks Bland
(Related: Time, Genius, Nation, Now, Will)
"If you hype something and it succeeds, you're a genius - it wasn't a hype. If you hype it and it fails, then it was just a hype."
- Neil Bogart
(Related: Genius)
"I've learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one."
- Daniel J. Boorstin
(Related: Genius, Fool)
"Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length."
- Christian Nestell Bovee
(Related: Talent, Genius)
"A few of the sublimest geniuses of Rome and Athens had some faint discoveries of the spiritual nature of the human soul, and formed some probable conjectures, that man was designed for a future state of existence."
- David Brainerd
(Related: Nature, Soul, Athens, Existence, Future, Man, Rome, Spiritual, State)
"I am the farthest thing from a computer genius."
- Jonathan Brandis
(Related: Genius, Computer)
"The genius of America is that we are still a land of undiscovered shores, and we are at our best when we open our hearts and allow the night winds to bring renewed visions of great deeds."
- Phil Bredesen
(Related: Genius, America, Deeds, Land, Night, Open, Visions)
"Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue."
- Andre Breton
(Related: Talent, Genius, Virtue, Man, Vice)
"Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright."
- Van Wyck Brooks
(Related: Genius, Virtue)
"Since when was genius found respectable?"
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(Related: Genius)
"What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?"
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(Related: Power, Genius, Individuality)
"The difference between being able to understand something and inventing it in the first place... is called genius."
- Craig Bruce
(Related: Genius, Being, Difference, First)
"T Bone is genius. The way they've recorded my voice and the instrumentation to these songs is really quite extraordinary."
- Betty Buckley
(Related: Genius, Songs, Voice)
"Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way."
- Charles Bukowski
(Related: Genius, Ability)
"Talent does what it can; genius does what it must."
- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
(Related: Talent, Genius)
"Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can."
- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
(Related: Talent, Genius)
"Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius."
- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
(Related: Genius, Man)
"Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity and truth accomplishes no victories without it."
- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
(Related: Genius, Truth, Enthusiasm, Sincerity)
"Those who have wrought great changes in the world never succeeded by gaining over chiefs; but always by exciting the multitude. The first is the resource of intrigue and produces only secondary results, the second is the resort of genius and transforms the universe."
- Martin Van Buren
(Related: Genius, First, Results, Universe, World)
"I have learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one."
- Leo Burnett
(Related: Genius, Fool)
"The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts."
- Ken Burns
(Related: Genius, Country, Jazz)
"The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius."
- Sid Caesar
(Related: Genius, First)
"No woman has ever been an authentic genius of the stature of men, but that does not enrage me."
- Taylor Caldwell
(Related: Men, Genius, Woman)
"What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts."
- Italo Calvino
(Related: Talent, Genius, Inspiration, Nothing, Right, Road, Romantic)
"Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains."
- Thomas Carlyle
(Related: Genius, Infinite)
"Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius."
- Thomas Carlyle
(Related: Humor, Genius, Perfection)
"If you stick with a vision, it might not all work, but some of it will be absolute genius. To me, 15 minutes worth of absolute genius in a film is so much better than two hours of mediocrity. I would rather pay to see something different like that."
- Kim Cattrall
(Related: Work, Genius, Vision, Film, Mediocrity, Will, Worth)
"Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience."
- Paul Cezanne
(Related: Experience, Genius, Ability, Emotions)
"Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded."
- Charlie Chaplin
(Related: Men, Genius, Man)
"Charlie Chaplin's genius was in comedy. He has no sense of humor, particularly about himself."
- Lita Grey Chaplin
(Related: Humor, Genius, Comedy, Sense)
"As a bull market continues, almost anything you buy goes up. It makes you feel that investing in stocks is a very easy and safe and that you're a financial genius."
- Ron Chernow
(Related: Genius, Financial)
"The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos."
- Lydia M. Child
(Related: Genius, Expression, Eye, Language)
"Genius is of no country."
- Charles Churchill
(Related: Genius, Country)
"Genius is independent of situation."
- Charles Churchill
(Related: Genius)
"True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information."
- Winston Churchill
(Related: Genius, Information)
"Intelligence recognizes what has happened. Genius recognizes what will happen."
- John Ciardi
(Related: Intelligence, Genius, Will)
"Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there."
- Emile M. Cioran
(Related: Dream, Sleep)
"It is the union of independence and dependence of these branches - legislative, executive and judicial - and of the governmental functions possessed by each of them, that constitutes the marvellous genius of this unrivalled document."
- J. Reuben Clark
(Related: Genius, Dependence, Independence)
"To be complex does not mean to be fragmented. This is the paradox and the genius of our Canadian civilization."
- Adrienne Clarkson
(Related: Genius, Civilization, Paradox)
"When you're young you believe it when people tell you how good you are. And that's the danger, you inhale. Everyone will tell you you're a genius, which you are not, and if you understand that, you win."
- George Clooney
(Related: Genius, People, Danger, Will)
"Ismail Merchant was just the most seductive, passionate, outrageous, driven, genius of a man."
- Glenn Close
(Related: Genius, Man)
"I make no claim to being a business genius. You can make so much money in this business that it loses its value."
- Nat King Cole
(Related: Business, Money, Genius, Being, Value)
"The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Genius, People, Being, Literature, Wit)
"Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Imagination, Talent, Genius, Action, Being, Lying, Reason, Understanding)
"To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Genius, Man, School)
"People of humor are always in some degree people of genius."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Humor, Genius, People)
"Genius, scholar, and war hero though he is, you have to admit - or maybe you should think about admitting - that George Bush might have rushed things a little in invading Iraq."
- Alan Colmes
(Related: War, Genius, Iraq)
"Moderation is the inseparable companion of wisdom, but with it genius has not even a nodding acquaintance."
- Charles Caleb Colton
(Related: Wisdom, Genius, Acquaintance, Moderation)
"The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end."
- Charles Caleb Colton
(Related: Genius, End, Interest, May, Posterity)
"A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius."
- Charles Horton Cooley
(Related: Talent, Genius, Mediocrity, World)
"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated failures. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."
- Calvin Coolidge
(Related: Education, Talent, Genius, People, Determination, Nothing, Persistence, Will, World)
"It requires genius to make a good pun - some men of bright parts can't reach it."
- Hannah Cowley
(Related: Men, Genius)
"Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you."
- Malcolm Cowley
(Related: Talent, Genius)
"In Goodfellas they have this one scene where the camera goes down some steps and walks through a kitchen into a restaurant and the critics were all over this as evidence of the genius of Scorsese and Scorsese is a genius."
- Alex Cox
(Related: Genius, Kitchen)
"The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as "Soho" poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent."
- Quentin Crisp
(Related: Talent, Genius, Poverty)
"Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien."
- Edward Dahlberg
(Related: Genius, Truth)
"Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them."
- Robertson Davies
(Related: Genius, People)
"Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can."
- Eugene Delacroix
(Related: Talent, Genius)
"What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough."
- Eugene Delacroix
(Related: Work, Genius, Idea, Ideas, Obsession)
"Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation."
- John Denham
(Related: Genius)
"We have to set our own agenda, we have to set our own standards, we have to be very strong about what we want, we have to be very strong about our passion and if it's not right for you, you shouldn't do it just because you're advised by so-called geniuses."
- Jackie DeShannon
(Related: Passion, Right, Want)
"The general interest of the masses might take the place of the insight of genius if it were allowed freedom of action."
- Denis Diderot
(Related: Genius, Action, Freedom, Interest)
"Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other."
- Denis Diderot
(Related: Genius, Evil, World)
"Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine."
- Denis Diderot
(Related: Men, Quality, Genius, Disorder, Machine)
"Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth."
- Denis Diderot
(Related: Men, Age, Genius, Events, Present)
"Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common."
- Denis Diderot
(Related: Nature, Observation, Reason, Reflection)
"Which is why, in my lieder concerts, I always strove, when possible, to sing only the works of a single composer, so that the audience could be gradually drawn into a particular creative genius' way of thinking, and could follow him."
- Dietrich Fischer Dieskau
(Related: Genius, Thinking)
"We allow no geniuses around our Studio."
- Walt Disney
"Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe."
- Benjamin Disraeli
(Related: Genius, Mediocrity, Talk)
"Genius, when young, is divine."
- Benjamin Disraeli
(Related: Genius)
"Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm."
- Benjamin Disraeli
(Related: Genius, Enthusiasm, Production)
"Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius."
- Benjamin Disraeli
(Related: Genius, Desperation)
"I realized what you could do in motion pictures by surrounding yourself with geniuses."
- Richard Donner
"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius."
- Arthur Conan Doyle
(Related: Talent, Genius, Mediocrity, Nothing)
"No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings."
- Peter Drucker
(Related: Leadership, Needs)
"Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought, but genius must be born; and never can be taught."
- John Dryden
(Related: Time, Genius, Action, May)
"Genius must be born, and never can be taught."
- John Dryden
(Related: Genius)
"Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened."
- Lawrence Durrell
(Related: Men, Genius, Laughter)
"The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable."
- Andrea Dworkin
(Related: Genius, Reality, Rebellion, United)
"Genius is talent set on fire by courage."
- Henry Van Dyke
(Related: Talent, Genius, Courage, Fire)
"I've never met a genius. A genius to me is someone who does well at something he hates. Anybody can do well at something he loves - it's just a question of finding the subject."
- Clint Eastwood
(Related: Genius, Question)
"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
- Thomas A. Edison
(Related: Genius, Inspiration)
"His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine."
- Thomas A. Edison
(Related: Genius, Inspiration, Content)
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Genius, Difference, Limits, Stupidity)
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Genius, Courage, Direction, Fool)
"Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Intellectuals, Problems)
"With the stones we cast at them, geniuses build new roads with them."
- Paul Eldridge
"You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl."
- George Eliot
(Related: Genius, Being, Man, May, Slavery)
"Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline."
- George Eliot
(Related: Genius, Discipline, First)
"Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy."
- Havelock Ellis
(Related: Genius, Man, Tragedy, World)
"The first Matrix genius, the second one, what's up with the dancing? I haven't even seen the third one."
- Ethan Embry
(Related: Genius, Dancing, First)
"The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Genius, Confidence, Man)
"When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Nature, Work, Genius)
"Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Genius, Clothes, Common sense)
"Genius always finds itself a century too early."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Genius)
"Great geniuses have the shortest biographies."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The lucky person passes for a genius."
- Euripides
(Related: Genius)
"The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success."
- Bruce Feirstein
(Related: Success, Genius, Insanity)
"Nietzsche claimed that his genius was in his nostrils and I think that is a very excellent place for it to be."
- Federico Fellini
(Related: Genius)
"Taste is the feminine of genius."
- Edward Fitzgerald
(Related: Genius, Taste)
"Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
(Related: Life, Genius, Feet, Fools, Wonder, World, Youth)
"Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
(Related: Genius, Ability, Effect, Mind)
"Genius is immediate, but talent takes time."
- Janet Flanner
(Related: Time, Talent, Genius)
"Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force."
- Gustave Flaubert
(Related: Genius, Energy, Force, Goodness)
"I truly miss the genius of the music of John Lennon, as I'm sure everybody does."
- Peter Fonda
(Related: Music, Genius)
"Genius is another word for magic, and the whole point of magic is that it is inexplicable."
- Margot Fonteyn
(Related: Genius, Inexplicable, Magic, Word)
"The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius."
- E. M. Forster
(Related: Men, Experience, Genius, Gain, Historians, Will, World)
"To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius."
- Lukas Foss
(Related: Genius)
"Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved."
- Lukas Foss
(Related: Work, Genius, Gods, Play, Silly)
"One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire."
- John W. Foster
(Related: Power, Genius, Fire)
"Genius without education is like silver in the mine."
- Benjamin Franklin
(Related: Education, Genius)
"My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water."
- Marilyn French
(Related: Books, Drinks, Water, Wine)
"If a professional musician in a symphony orchestra is playing Beethoven. But this particular orchestra have played this particular chestnut so many times, they can play it in their sleep. Does the genius remain present in the music or not?"
- Robert Fripp
(Related: Music, Genius, Play, Present, Sleep)
"The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency."
- Margaret Fuller
(Related: Women, Genius, Spiritual)
"Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
(Related: Genius, Living)
"I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
(Related: Experience, Genius)
"You don't have to be a political genius to sniff the smell of blood in the water."
- Rich Galen
(Related: Genius, Blood, Water)
"God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be. Follow always that great law. Let the sky and God be our limit and Eternity our measurement."
- Marcus Garvey
(Related: Nature, Genius, God, Eternity, First, Law, Sky, Want)
"Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly."
- Jose Ortega y Gasset
(Related: Genius, Inspiration, Magic)
"Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius."
- Edward Gibbon
(Related: Genius, Conversation, School, Solitude, Understanding)
"My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed."
- Allen Ginsberg
(Related: Experience, Genius, Bed, Students)
"The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a grip on our eyeballs and eardrums, which in turn can be marketed to advertisers."
- Todd Gitlin
(Related: Genius, Ability, Attention, Desire, Machine)
"A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation."
- Max Gluckman
(Related: Science, Genius, Discipline, Fool)
"Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much."
- William Godwin
(Related: Genius, Learning, Spirit)
"Common sense is the genius of humanity."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(Related: Genius, Common sense, Humanity)
"First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(Related: Love, Genius, Truth, First)
"If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(Related: Children, Nothing)
"Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning."
- Oliver Goldsmith
(Related: Genius, Grammar, Learning, Liquor, Nonsense)
"Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day."
- Samuel Goldwyn
(Related: Genius, Day)
"Genius is the talent of a person who is dead."
- Edmond de Goncourt
(Related: Talent, Genius)
"It takes application, a fine sense of value, and a powerful community-spirit for a people to have serious leisure, and this has not been the genius of the Americans."
- Paul Goodman
(Related: Genius, People, Americans, Community, Leisure, Sense, Value)
"The genius of the American system is that through freedom we have created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people."
- Phil Gramm
(Related: Genius, People, American, Freedom, Old, Results)
"But I just know from experience that accent wise, even if you're an accent genius, crossing the Atlantic is the hardest thing in the world either way."
- Hugh Grant
(Related: Experience, Genius, World)
"Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers."
- Robert Graves
(Related: Genius, Answers)
"Commerce changes the fate and genius of nations."
- Thomas Gray
(Related: Genius, Commerce, Fate, Nations)
"Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun."
- Franz Grillparzer
(Related: Wisdom, Genius, Sun)
"The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the 'genius' of the personage, the greater the profit."
- George Grosz
(Related: Business, Individuality, Personality, Poets, Profit)
"There is nothing in the genius of America more precious today than the spirit of religious and political tolerance in its application to our own people."
- Paul Harris
(Related: Genius, People, America, Nothing, Religious, Spirit, Today, Tolerance)
"David Ortiz is a genius. He's incredible to watch. Over and over, he hits home runs that are simply transcendent."
- Juliana Hatfield
(Related: Home, Genius)
"Nothing is so envied as genius, nothing so hopeless of attainment by labor alone. Though labor always accompanies the greatest genius, without the intellectual gift labor alone will do little."
- B. R. Hayden
(Related: Genius, Labor, Nothing, Will)
"Genius is nothing more than common faculties refined to a greater intensity. There are no astonishing ways of doing astonishing things. All astonishing things are done by ordinary materials."
- Benjamin Haydon
(Related: Genius, Nothing)
"If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators."
- William Hazlitt
(Related: Genius, Force, Learning, May, Shakespeare, Study)
"Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use."
- William Hazlitt
(Related: Genius, Humanity, Want)
"Rules and models destroy genius and art."
- William Hazlitt
(Related: Art, Genius, Rules)
"Dandyism is a variety of genius."
- William Hazlitt
(Related: Genius, Variety)
"People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel."
- William Hazlitt
(Related: Work, Genius, People, Profession)
"Talent is a faculty that is highly developed, but genius commands all the faculties."
- Francis Herbert Hedge
(Related: Talent, Genius)
"Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction."
- Heinrich Heine
(Related: Genius, Fiction)
"Genius is nothing but continued attention."
- Claude Adrien Helvetius
(Related: Genius, Attention, Nothing)
"Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself."
- Robert Henri
(Related: Genius, Growth, Play, Possession, Will)
"I've played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses - and that's probably enough for any man."
- Charlton Heston
(Related: Man, Saints)
"It will work. I am a marketing genius."
- Paris Hilton
(Related: Work, Genius, Marketing, Will)
"All of us, who are members of the Germanic peoples, can be happy and thankful that once in thousands of years fate has given us, from among the Germanic peoples, such a genius, a leader, our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, and you should be happy to be allowed to work with us."
- Heinrich Himmler
(Related: Work, Leader, Genius, Fate, Years)
"The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category."
- Adolf Hitler
(Related: Leader, Genius, Ability, Opponents)
"Is it not in the most absolute simplicity that real genius plies its pinions the most wonderfully?"
- E. T. A. Hoffmann
(Related: Genius, Simplicity)
"Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature."
- J. G. Holland
(Related: Nature, Genius)
"The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
(Related: Talent, Genius, Open, World)
"Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things."
- Bell Hooks
(Related: Art, Genius, People, Idea, Attention, Thinking, Yesterday)
"Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible."
- Anthony Hope
(Related: Genius, Being)
"Unless you are a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible."
- Anthony Hope
(Related: Genius, Being)
"Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it."
- Horace
(Related: Genius, Adversity, Prosperity)
"A host is like a general: calamities often reveal his genius."
- Horace
(Related: Genius)
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped."
- Elbert Hubbard
(Related: Genius, Limitations, May, Stupidity)
"Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius."
- Robert Hughes
(Related: Time, Genius, Popular)
"The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Genius, Ideas, Man)
"Taste is the common sense of genius."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Genius, Common sense, Taste)
"There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Genius, Horror, Mediocrity)
"Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Genius, Infinite)
"Genius: the superhuman in man."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Man)
"We are all geniuses up to the age of ten."
- Aldous Huxley
(Related: Age)
"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm."
- Aldous Huxley
(Related: Age, Genius, Enthusiasm, Losing, Old, Spirit)
"In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous."
- Robert Green Ingersoll
(Related: Genius, Mediocrity)
"Rising genius always shoots out its rays from among the clouds, but these will gradually roll away and disappear as it ascends to its steady luster."
- Washington Irving
(Related: Genius, Clouds, Will)
"Genius is initiative on fire."
- Holbrook Jackson
(Related: Genius, Fire)
"The essence of genius is to know what to overlook."
- William James
(Related: Genius)
"Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way."
- William James
(Related: Genius)
"It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention."
- Lyndon B. Johnson
(Related: Genius, American, Constitution, Invention, Principles)
"A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself."
- Samuel Johnson
(Related: Genius, Man)
"It's a lucky child that knows that they're a genius, unaimed and all that."
- Diana Wynne Jones
(Related: Genius)
"I do feel very strongly that this is one of the things which people need encouragement to sort out, because I have this very strong feeling that everybody is probably a genius at something, it's just a question of finding this."
- Diana Wynne Jones
(Related: Genius, People, Encouragement, Feeling, Question)
"And indeed if you think you're a genius at something, what you achieve is very much according to your expectations; if you think you're no good, you're not going to get anywhere."
- Diana Wynne Jones
(Related: Genius, Expectations)
"I feel very fortunate to have been associated with people such as Rodgers and Hammerstein. I think they were geniuses of their time."
- Shirley Jones
(Related: Time, People)
"Genius is a word too often tossed around in musical circles."
- Stanley Jordan
(Related: Genius, Word)
"Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them."
- Joseph Joubert
(Related: Genius, Labor)
"A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."
- James Joyce
(Related: Genius, Discovery, Errors, Man, Mistakes)
"Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better."
- Carl Jung
(Related: Talent, Genius)
"The media works in sound bites. They can make you look like a genius or stupid."
- Kato Kaelin
(Related: Genius, Media, Sound)
"Then I heard this genius teacher Stella Adler - I recommend you read anything you might find about her and if you have anyone interested in theatre, you get them one of her books."
- Harvey Keitel
(Related: Genius, Books, Theatre)
"If we will maintain our hope and confidence in the genius of our people, they will work out this problem, and their ability and industry will bring us back to normal conditions."
- Frank B. Kellogg
(Related: Work, Genius, People, Hope, Ability, Confidence, Will)
"Gene Roddenberry was a genius."
- Persis Khambatta
(Related: Genius)
"Doorman - a genius who can open the door of your car with one hand, help you in with the other, and still have one left for the tip."
- Dorothy Kilgallen
(Related: Car, Genius, Help, Open)
"She was a genius, my mother."
- Sally Kirkland
(Related: Mother, Genius)
"The only folk I can judge are people like Woody Allen who I think is a genius, largely because I think he has beaten the system. He has his own company, and his films are all his own ideas. It's his direction, and so it comes out the way he imagined it."
- Nigel Kneale
(Related: Genius, People, Ideas, Company, Direction, Folk)
"People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones."
- Donald Knuth
(Related: Art, Science, People, Computer, Reality)
"The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers."
- Arthur Koestler
(Related: Genius, Originality, Perfection)
"Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways. But the good artists who follow after genius - and I count myself among these - have to restore the lost connection once more."
- Kathe Kollwitz
(Related: Genius, Artists, Connection)
"Genius is an overused word. The world has known only about a half dozen geniuses. I got only fairly near."
- Fritz Kreisler
(Related: Genius, Word, World)
"Man is a genius when he is dreaming."
- Akira Kurosawa
(Related: Genius, Man)
"I was induced to establish several orders of merit, from conviction that emulation, well directed, becomes a useful servant; and, that the latent genius of some youth is more easily brought into action this way, than by the more sordid gratification of self-interest."
- Joseph Lancaster
(Related: Genius, Action, Conviction, Merit, Self, Youth)
"Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all the other qualities. It is the nec plus ultra of the intelligence. Through this alone is genius the supreme health and balance of all the faculties."
- Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont
(Related: Health, Intelligence, Quality, Genius, Balance, Taste)
"Who in the same given time can produce more than others has vigor; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius."
- Johann Kaspar Lavater
(Related: Time, Genius)
"Who makes quick use of the moment is a genius of prudence."
- Johann Kaspar Lavater
(Related: Genius, Prudence, Quick)
"He who seldom speaks, and with one calm well-timed word can strike dumb the loquacious, is a genius or a hero."
- Johann Kaspar Lavater
(Related: Genius, Dumb, Word)
"Neatness begets order; but from order to taste there is the same difference as from taste to genius, or from love to friendship."
- Johann Kaspar Lavater
(Related: Friendship, Love, Genius, Difference, Order, Taste)
"When you step back and watch people, you realize that we use every single body part. Movement, dance - I find it genius because it's ultimate expression, really."
- Jude Law
(Related: Genius, People, Dance, Body, Expression)
"They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates."
- David Herbert Lawrence
(Related: Mothers)
"I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats."
- Irving Layton
(Related: Genius, Poems, Shakespeare, Will)
"The problem with Ireland is that it's a country full of genius, but with absolutely no talent."
- Hugh Leonard
(Related: Talent, Genius, Country, Ireland)
"There is no off position on the genius switch."
- David Letterman
(Related: Genius)
"There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."
- Oscar Levant
(Related: Genius, Insanity)
"What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left."
- Oscar Levant
(Related: Humility, Needs, World)
"Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed."
- George Henry Lewes
(Related: Beauty, Genius, Growth, Spring, Years)
"Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes."
- George Henry Lewes
(Related: Genius)
"People hate me because I am a multifaceted, talented, wealthy, internationally famous genius."
- Jerry Lewis
(Related: Genius, People, Famous, Hate)
"Adlai Stevenson has a genius for saying the right thing, at the right time, to the wrong people."
- Joe E. Lewis
(Related: Time, Genius, People, Right, Saying, Wrong)
"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."
- Joseph Lewis
(Related: Age, Time, Genius, Books, Imprisonment, Opinion, Tribute)
"There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself."
- Georg C. Lichtenberg
(Related: Talent, Genius, People)
"Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together."
- Georg C. Lichtenberg
(Related: Genius, Ideas)
"It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists."
- Georg C. Lichtenberg
(Related: Life, Genius)
"Being stuck is a position few of us like. We want something new but cannot let go of the old - old ideas, beliefs, habits, even thoughts. We are out of contact with our own genius. Sometimes we know we are stuck; sometimes we don't. In both cases we have to DO something."
- Rush Limbaugh
(Related: Genius, Ideas, Thoughts, Being, Beliefs, Habits, Old, Want)
"Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored."
- Abraham Lincoln
(Related: Genius)
"My evil genius Procrastination has whispered me to tarry 'til a more convenient season."
- Mary Todd Lincoln
(Related: Genius, Evil, Procrastination)
"I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?"
- Charles de Lint
(Related: Genius, Being)
"The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully."
- Walter Lippmann
(Related: Leader, Genius, Common sense, Grace)
"Industry is a better horse to ride than genius."
- Walter Lippmann
(Related: Genius)
"Olivier was another case of a genius, who couldn't understand why anybody would have any trouble doing this, because for him it came so easily."
- James Lipton
(Related: Genius, Trouble)
"Geniuses always think it's easier than we make it out to be."
- James Lipton
"The definition of genius, really, should be that that person can do what the rest of us have to learn how to do."
- James Lipton
(Related: Genius, Rest)
"Mike Patton is a genius... It is definitely the hardest music I've ever played."
- Dave Lombardo
(Related: Music, Genius)
"Unfortunately, goodness and honor are rather the exception than the rule among exceptional men, not to speak of geniuses."
- Cesare Lombroso
(Related: Men, Goodness, Honor)
"The appearance of a single great genius is more than equivalent to the birth of a hundred mediocrities."
- Cesare Lombroso
(Related: Genius, Appearance)
"Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men as lunatics."
- Cesare Lombroso
(Related: Men, Genius, Reason, Sense)
"Genius is one of the many forms of insanity."
- Cesare Lombroso
(Related: Genius, Insanity)
"Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(Related: Men, Genius, Society, Earth)
"Churchill was one of the few men I have met who even in the flesh give me the impression of genius. George Bernard Shaw is another. It is amusing to know that each thinks the other is overrated."
- David Low
(Related: Men, Genius, Impression)
"Freedom is the only law which genius knows."
- James Russell Lowell
(Related: Genius, Freedom, Law)
"It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us."
- James Russell Lowell
(Related: Life, Genius, Privilege, Rest)
"Clinton's fakery was so deft and deeply ingrained that it was impossible to tell where it ended and the real Bill Clinton began. This constituted a kind of political genius."
- Rich Lowry
(Related: Genius)
"Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead."
- Robert Lynd
(Related: Genius, Being, Man)
"We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age."
- Thomas B. Macaulay
(Related: Age, Genius, Proof)
"You may think me crude, and probably I am crude, but I am not so crude as I was, for I am clever enough to see that the girl of nineteen who thought herself a genius was only an unusual girl writing her heart out."
- Mary MacLane
(Related: Genius, Thought, Heart, May, Writing)
"I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be."
- Mary MacLane
(Related: Genius, Now, Saying)
"Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul."
- Mary MacLane
(Related: Quality, Genius, Soul, Heart, Body, Woman)
"The capacity of the female mind for studies of the highest order cannot be doubted, having been sufficiently illustrated by its works of genius, of erudition, and of science."
- James Madison
(Related: Science, Genius, Mind, Order)
"Genius is not perfected, it is deepened. It does not so much interpret the world as fertilize itself with it."
- Andre Malraux
(Related: Genius, World)
"When I edit, I'm not from the school of Hello, I'm a genius, so everybody shut up. I'm from the school of Let's play it once in front of an audience, and then I'll tell you where it is going."
- Garry Marshall
(Related: Genius, Play, School)
"And I think it is the genius of actors to be able to escape whatever people are expecting of them. Otherwise you become like a factory worker."
- Olivier Martinez
(Related: Genius, People, Actors)
"The simplest of women are wonderful liars who can extricate themselves from the most difficult dilemmas with a skill bordering on genius."
- Guy de Maupassant
(Related: Women, Genius, Skill)
"I think that my interpretation of Italian was a lot more southern than what my husband cooks. You know, I grew up in Queens and in Brooklyn, and we - really, it's more southern. It's Naples and Sicily. It's heavier. It's over-spiced. And like most Americans, I thought spaghetti and meatballs was genius."
- Debi Mazar
(Related: HusbGenius, Thought, Americans)
"Genius is always accompanied by enthusiasm."
- Bryant H. McGill
(Related: Genius, Enthusiasm)
"Genius is eternal patience."
- Michelangelo
(Related: Genius, Patience)
"The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time."
- John Stuart Mill
(Related: Society, Time, Genius, Courage, Danger, Eccentricity, Now)
"Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character had abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and courage which it contained."
- John Stuart Mill
(Related: Society, Genius, Character, Courage, Strength, Eccentricity)
"There is no genius in life like the genius of energy and industry."
- Donald G. Mitchell
(Related: Life, Genius, Energy)
"It is always well to get near to men of genius."
- William Henry Moody
(Related: Men, Genius)
"Genius without religion is only a lamp on the outer gate of a palace; it may serve to cast a gleam of light on those that are without, while the inhabitant sits in darkness."
- Hannah More
(Related: Religion, Genius, Darkness, Light, May)
"No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does."
- Christopher Morley
(Related: Genius, Conversation)
"But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched by the same madness and genius."
- Marston Morse
(Related: Sister, Genius, Madness, Mathematics)
"It's not that complicated. If you hear something and it makes you want to hear it again, that's the ticket. You have to be lucky enough to find geniuses, welcome them and get out of their way."
- Jerry Moss
(Related: Want)
"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(Related: Imagination, Intelligence, Love, Genius, Soul)
"I think they should take everyone who works for The National Enquirer and the Star, and everyone who works for Us Weekly, and put them all to work looking for terrorists. I think they would find the terrorists. All of them. It would be genius!"
- Brittany Murphy
(Related: Work)
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."
- W. H. Murray
(Related: Power, Genius, Dream, Boldness, Magic)
"A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses."
- Robert Musil
(Related: Deep, Literature, Man)
"It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Dreams, Genius, African, Pity, Snow)
"I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Genius)
"Genius is an African who dreams up snow."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Dreams, Genius, African, Snow)
"All of a sudden, those few pages of script that he had shown me with the weird images I could visualize all of that in my brain, and I knew that there was this mad little genius at work here and I really wanted to do the film."
- Jack Nance
(Related: Work, Genius, Film)
"The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something."
- Gamal Abdel Nasser
(Related: Genius, Possibility, Americans, Rest, Wonder)
"If my impressions are correct, our educational planing mill cuts down all the knots of genius, and reduces the best of the men who go through it to much the same standard."
- Simon Newcomb
(Related: Men, Genius)
"In this world no one rules by love; if you are but amiable, you are no hero; to be powerful, you must be strong, and to have dominion you must have a genius for organizing."
- John Henry Newman
(Related: Love, Genius, Rules, World)
"I like the idea of taking a true classic written by a true genius and destroying it essentially! I like the idea of bringing it down to earth a bit - and even a bit lower than that."
- Randy Newman
(Related: Genius, Idea, Earth)
"The meetings of the legislature at Springfield then first brought together that splendid group of young men of genius whose phenomenal careers and distinguished services have given Illinois fame in the history of the nation."
- John George Nicolay
(Related: History, Men, Genius, Careers, Fame, First, Meetings, Nation)
"There are very few men of genius in advertising agencies. But we need all we can find. Almost without exception they are disagreeable. Don't destroy them. They lay golden eggs."
- David Ogilvy
(Related: Men, Genius, Advertising)
"First, make yourself a reputation for being a creative genius. Second, surround yourself with partners who are better than you are. Third, leave them to go get on with it."
- David Ogilvy
(Related: Genius, Being, First, Reputation)
"I think one of the geniuses of Bound and The Matrix and Memento is the complete collaboration of the effort. There were no rotten apples."
- Joe Pantoliano
(Related: Apples, Collaboration, Effort)
"No one can arrive from being talented alone, work transforms talent into genius."
- Anna Pavlova
(Related: Work, Talent, Genius, Being)
"God gives talent. Work transforms talent into genius."
- Anna Pavlova
(Related: Work, Talent, Genius, God)
"Short of genius a rich man cannot even imagine poverty."
- Charles Peguy
(Related: Genius, Man, Poverty)
"Love is rarer than genius itself. And friendship is rarer than love."
- Charles Peguy
(Related: Friendship, Love, Genius)
"Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it."
- Alan Perlis
(Related: Complexity, Fools)
"The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima."
- Pablo Picasso
(Related: Genius)
"What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero."
- Pablo Picasso
(Related: Genius, Childhood, Day, May, Will)
"Every positive value has its price in negative terms... the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima."
- Pablo Picasso
(Related: Genius, Negative, Positive, Value)
"Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius."
- Albert Pike
(Related: Men, Genius, Artists, Poets, Poor, World)
"The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be."
- Edgar Allan Poe
(Related: Genius, Saying, Silence)
"I also think if you're an actor and you can improvise, when you go on an audition and you can improvise you're just a genius. If you can, you know, take a Tide commercial and you can just say one funny line that's not in the commercial they think you're a genius."
- Amy Poehler
(Related: Funny, Genius, Actor)
"One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit."
- Alexander Pope
(Related: Science, Art, Genius, Will, Wit)
"Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly."
- Alexander Pope
(Related: Genius, Folly, Sense, Taste)
"A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression."
- Ezra Pound
(Related: Genius, Expression, Man, Right)
"Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."
- Ezra Pound
(Related: Genius, Man)
"Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up."
- Terry Pratchett
(Related: Genius, Blood)
"If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not - and the odds are against it - go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper - write."
- J. B. Priestley
(Related: Genius, Challenge, Rules)
"We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in colour and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types."
- J. B. Priestley
(Related: Society, Fire, Sound)
"There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent."
- J. B. Priestley
(Related: Talent, Genius, Writers)
"We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in color and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types."
- Joseph Priestley
(Related: Society, Fire, Sound)
"Some Italians are geniuses, but you have to find a balance."
- Alain Prost
(Related: Balance)
"Like many businessmen of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient. And so he simply set about achieving that efficient monopoly."
- Mario Puzo
(Related: Genius, Competition)
"If there be anything that can be called genius, it consists chiefly in ability to give that attention to a subject which keeps it steadily in the mind, till we have surveyed it accurately on all sides."
- Robert Quillen
(Related: Genius, Ability, Attention, Mind)
"It seldom happens that a premature shoot of genius ever arrives at maturity."
- Marcus Fabius Quintilian
(Related: Genius, Maturity)
"Only a genius can play a fool."
- Michael Rapaport
(Related: Genius, Fool, Play)
"One of the satisfactions of a genius is his will-power and obstinacy."
- Man Ray
(Related: Genius, Obstinacy, Will)
"Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius."
- Joshua Reynolds
(Related: Genius, Rules, Taste)
"The difference in the education of men and women must give the former great advantages over the latter, even where geniuses are equal."
- Samuel Richardson
(Related: Education, Men, Women, Difference)
"Genius is the recovery of childhood at will."
- Arthur Rimbaud
(Related: Genius, Childhood, Will)
"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Genius, Simplicity, Unix)
"Passion is the genesis of genius."
- Tony Robbins
(Related: Genius, Passion)
"We can all be geniuses because one definition of genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains."
- Knute Rockne
(Related: Genius, Infinite)
"The modes of expression of men of genius differ as much as their souls, and it is impossible to say that in some among them, drawing and color are better or worse than in others."
- Auguste Rodin
(Related: Men, Genius, Expression)
"The function of a genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve."
- Hugh Trevor Roper
(Related: Time, Genius, Answers, Mediocrity, Questions)
"No one turns down a film with Woody; it's something everyone wants in their career as an important moment. He's such a comedic genius, without question, so I was thrilled."
- Mark Rydell
(Related: Genius, Career, Film, Question)
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
- Carl Sagan
(Related: Brothers, Columbus, Fact)
"But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time."
- George Saintsbury
(Related: Time, Genius, English, Man)
"Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius."
- George Sand
(Related: Experience, Genius, Effort, Simplicity, World)
"A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man."
- Carl Sandburg
(Related: Talent, Genius, Man)
"Creative genius is a divinely bestowed gift which is the coronation of the few."
- Margaret E. Sangster
(Related: Genius)
"For 37 years I've practiced 14 hours a day, and now they call me a genius."
- Pablo de Sarasate
(Related: Genius, Day, Now, Years)
"Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!"
- May Sarton
(Related: Genius, Baby, Forget, Months, Temperament, Will)
"I wouldn't say jamie is an evil genius. I'm not sure he's evil and I'm not sure he's a genius."
- Adam Savage
(Related: Genius, Evil)
"Every true genius is bound to be naive."
- Friedrich Schiller
(Related: Genius)
"Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit."
- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
(Related: Genius, Reason, Spirit, Wit)
"Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius."
- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
(Related: Genius, Virtue, Man)
"There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age."
- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
(Related: Age, Men, Genius, Community, Self)
"The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office."
- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
(Related: Genius, Fact, Man, Office)
"Australians are geniuses with a good sense of humour."
- Fred Schneider
(Related: Sense)
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
(Related: Talent, Genius)
"Talent works, genius creates."
- Robert Schumann
(Related: Talent, Genius)
"There is no great genius without some touch of madness."
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
(Related: Genius, Madness)
"Genius always gives its best at first; prudence, at last."
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
(Related: Genius, First, Prudence)
"Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius."
- Fulton J. Sheen
(Related: Genius, Jealousy, Mediocrity, Tribute)
"This homage has been rendered not to me - for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me - but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius."
- Henryk Sienkiewicz
(Related: Genius, Achievement, Writers)
"The dread of criticism is the death of genius."
- William Gilmore Simms
(Related: Death, Genius, Criticism)
"Genius is the very eye of intellect and the wing of thought; it is always in advance of its time, and is the pioneer for the generation which it precedes."
- William Gilmore Simms
(Related: Time, Genius, Thought, Eye, Intellect)
"He who would acquire fame must not show himself afraid of censure. The dread of censure is the death of genius."
- William Gilmore Simms
(Related: Death, Genius, Censure, Fame)
"The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new."
- Alexander Smith
(Related: Genius, Thought, Thoughts, Old, World)
"Governmental aid is a drawback rather than an assistance, as, although it may facilitate in the routine of artistic production, it is an impediment to the development of true artistic genius."
- John Philip Sousa
(Related: Genius, Development, May, Production, Routine)
"The genius of our institutions is democratic - baseball is a democratic game."
- Al Spalding
(Related: Genius, Baseball)
"Can a woman become a genius of the first class? Nobody can know unless women in general shall have equal opportunity with men in education, in vocational choice, and in social welcome of their best intellectual work for a number of generations."
- Anna Garlin Spencer
(Related: Men, Women, Work, Education, Genius, Opportunity, Choice, Class, First, Generations, Woman)
"The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement."
- Anna Garlin Spencer
(Related: Women, Talent, Genius, Achievement, Failure, Ambition, Effort, First, Rank)
"The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death."
- Edmund Spenser
(Related: Death, Genius, Monuments, Poets, Will)
"Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities."
- Madame de Stael
(Related: Power, Genius, Candor, Innocence)
"Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it."
- Madame de Stael
(Related: Genius)
"It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing."
- Gertrude Stein
(Related: Time, Genius, Nothing)
"The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light."
- George Steiner
(Related: Genius, Light, Man, Shadow)
"The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water."
- Stendhal
(Related: Art, Work, Genius, Hell, Joy, Man, Water, Will)
"All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly."
- Alexander Hamilton Stephens
(Related: Genius, Lies, Study)
"A man possesses talent; genius possesses the man."
- Isaac Stern
(Related: Talent, Genius, Man)
"Jim Carrey, a comic genius, has a harder time overcoming the public's desire for him to be funny simply because he's so good at it."
- Ben Stiller
(Related: Funny, Time, Genius, Desire, Overcoming, Public)
"The genius of the French language, descended from its single Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction - in simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint."
- Lytton Strachey
(Related: Genius, Clarity, Direction, Language, Restraint, Simplicity, Unity)
"In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought."
- Lytton Strachey
(Related: Quality, Genius, Thought, Character, Earth, Writers)
"During this earlier period of his activity Voltaire seems to have been trying - half unconsciously, perhaps - to discover and to express the fundamental quality of his genius."
- Lytton Strachey
(Related: Quality, Genius, Trying)
"I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Genius, Variety, Will)
"I figured if the plane goes down, I'll go with a great genius and will always have my name connected with his."
- Matthew Sweet
(Related: Genius, Name, Will)
"When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him."
- Jonathan Swift
(Related: Genius)
"I'm all in favor of the democratic principle that one idiot is as good as one genius, but I draw the line when someone takes the next step and concludes that two idiots are better than one genius."
- Leo Szilard
(Related: Genius, Idiots)
"But I don't think I have any particular talent for prediction, because when you have three or four elements in hand, you don't have to be a genius to reach certain conclusions."
- Antonio Tabucchi
(Related: Talent, Genius)
"The art music of the West has developed through out its history by means of individual geniuses, and out of the soil supporting them; non-Western musicians were born, and grew like the grasses of the field."
- Toru Takemitsu
(Related: Art, History, Music, Musicians)
"Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein."
- Joe Theismann
(Related: Genius, Football)
"Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Nature, Genius, Divinity)
"The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Nature, Genius, Artist, Law, Man, Observation, Rules)
"I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Genius)
"What is called genius is the abundance of life and health."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Health, Life, Genius, Abundance)
"The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express."
- Alexis de Tocqueville
(Related: Genius, Ideas, Words)
"Buddy Rich is one of a kind; he's a genius, and that's all there is to it."
- Mel Torme
(Related: Genius)
"Every man is a potential genius until he does something."
- Herbert Beerbohm Tree
(Related: Genius, Man, Potential)
"I mean, Scorsese's a genius, and that's one way of shooting."
- Stanley Tucci
(Related: Genius)
"Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered - either by themselves or by others."
- Mark Twain
"My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water."
- Mark Twain
(Related: Books, Drinks, Water, Wine)
"To see things in the seed, that is genius."
- Lao Tzu
(Related: Genius)
"Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes."
- Edgard Varese
(Related: Genius, People)
"In our own time it has been seen... that simple children, roughly brought up in the wilderness, have begun to draw by themselves, impelled by their own natural genius, instructed solely by the example of these beautiful paintings and sculptures of Nature."
- Giorgio Vasari
(Related: Nature, Time, Genius, Children, Example, Wilderness)
"Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect idea that they subsequently express with their hands."
- Giorgio Vasari
(Related: Men, Work, Genius, Idea, Inventions, Thinking)
"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return."
- Gore Vidal
(Related: Genius, People, Class, Majority, Nothing, Questioning, Taxes)
"Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60."
- Gore Vidal
(Related: Genius)
"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active."
- Leonardo da Vinci
(Related: Men, Work, Genius)
"The truth is that our race survived ignorance; it is our scientific genius that will do us in."
- Stephen Vizinczey
(Related: Genius, Truth, Ignorance, Race, Will)
"Everything I do, I feel is genius. Whether it is or it isn't."
- Rufus Wainwright
(Related: Genius)
"Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius."
- An Wang
(Related: Success, Genius, Common sense)
"Genius is never understood in its own time."
- Bill Watterson
(Related: Time, Genius)
"Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought."
- Simone Weil
(Related: Genius, Thought, Virtue, Humility, Nothing, Supernatural)
"All genius is a conquering of chaos and mystery."
- Otto Weininger
(Related: Genius, Chaos, Mystery)
"The genius which runs to madness is no longer genius."
- Otto Weininger
(Related: Genius, Madness)
"I have never been an innovator, a creative genius."
- Lawrence Welk
(Related: Genius)
"Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!"
- Orson Welles
(Related: Genius)
"My job is to pay attention to my children's genius and allow those leanings to lead them to their future."
- Lisa Whelchel
(Related: Genius, Attention, Children, Future, Job)
"I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring."
- James Whistler
(Related: Genius, Heaven)
"Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one."
- E. B. White
(Related: Genius)
"Common sense is genius in homespun."
- Alfred North Whitehead
(Related: Genius, Common sense)
"There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius."
- Walt Whitman
(Related: Power, Genius)
"The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people."
- Walt Whitman
(Related: Genius, People, Churches, Newspapers, states, United)
"Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities."
- Oscar Wilde
(Related: Genius, Ridicule, Tribute)
"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius."
- Oscar Wilde
(Related: Genius, Public)
"I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works."
- Oscar Wilde
(Related: Life, Talent, Genius)
"An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius."
- Billy Wilder
(Related: Genius, May, Wrong)
"Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire."
- Bern Williams
(Related: Talent, Genius, Fire)
"Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine."
- Edmund Wilson
(Related: Genius, Will)
"The only genius that's worth anything is the genius for hard work."
- Kathleen Winsor
(Related: Work, Genius, Hard work, Worth)
"There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone."
- Tom Wolfe
(Related: Time, Men, Genius, Destiny, Earth, Famous, Man, Now, Poets, Woman)
"It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work."
- Virginia Woolf
(Related: Age, Work, Genius, Cleanliness, Extravagance, Hard work, Riot)
"He's a tremendous guy. And what's more, he's virtually a genius in the field of management."
- John Wozniak
(Related: Genius, Management)
"In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by."
- Steve Wozniak
(Related: Life, Science, Genius, Mathematics, Measure)
"And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization."
- Chauncey Wright
(Related: Men, Science, Genius, Civilization, Progress)
"How are men to be secured in any rights without instruction; how to be secured in the equal exercise of those rights without equality of instruction? By instruction understand me to mean knowledge - just knowledge; not talent, not genius, not inventive mental powers."
- Frances Wright
(Related: Equality, Men, Talent, Genius, Knowledge, Exercise, Rights)
"The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away."
- Walter Wriston
(Related: Genius, Competition)
"Mike gets to play four roles this time, if we ever did it again, he will play my role as well. He is a comic genius, everyone wants to be in this movie, let's hope that everyone will wish to see it as well."
- Michael York
(Related: Time, Genius, Hope, Play, Will)
"If beauty isn't genius it usually signals at least a high level of animal cunning."
- Peter York
(Related: Beauty, Genius, Cunning)
"They shaved my head, eyebrows. This is not a sci-fi picture. It's not a fantasy picture. You're dealing with something that's supposed to be in reality. But we had a genius makeup artist."
- Rick Yune
(Related: Genius, Artist, Fantasy, Makeup, Reality)
"First have being in your mind. Make real in your mind then bring that being into reality. The genius is he who sees what is not yet and causes it to come to be."
- Peter Nivio Zarlenga
(Related: Genius, Being, Causes, First, Mind, Reality)