Quotes on Genius

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

Author: Henry Adams

A genius is one who can do anything except make a living.

Author: Joey Adams

Genius is sorrow's child.

Author: John Adams

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.

Author: Joseph Addison

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.

Author: William Alger

A genius knows how to make himself easily understood without being obvious about it.

Author: Jean Anouilh

The function of genius is to furnish cretins with ideas twenty years later.

Author: Louis Aragon

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Author: Aristotle

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

Author: Aristotle

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

Author: Aristotle

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.

Author: Richard Attenborough

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.

Author: Louis Auchincloss

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.

Author: Charles Babbage

The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.

Author: Francis Bacon

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

Author: J. Ballard

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.

Author: Honore Balzac

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

Author: Charles Baudelaire

Because you are a great lord, you believe yourself to be a great genius. You took the trouble to be born, but no more.

Author: Pierre Beaumarchais

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.

Author: Beck

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.

Author: Beck

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.

Author: Max Beerbohm

Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.

Author: Bernard Berenson

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.

Author: Henri Bergson

The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.

Author: Aneurin Bevan

Genius - to know without having learned; to draw just conclusions from unknown premises; to discern the soul of things.

Author: Ambrose Bierce

Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius.

Author: Josh Billings

Genius ain't anything more than elegant common sense.

Author: Josh Billings

As far as me knowing if Frank was a genius - in those days, I thought Einstein was the only genius around.

Author: Jimmy Black

Of all the projects I've worked on, I've never worked with another director like Billy Friedkin. I think he's a genius.

Author: Linda Blair

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.

Author: Neil Bogart

I've learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.

Author: Daniel Boorstin

I am the farthest thing from a computer genius.

Author: Jonathan Brandis

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.

Author: Phil Bredesen

Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.

Author: Van Brooks

Since when was genius found respectable?

Author: Elizabeth Browning

The difference between being able to understand something and inventing it in the first place... is called genius.

Author: Craig Bruce

T Bone is genius. The way they've recorded my voice and the instrumentation to these songs is really quite extraordinary.

Author: Betty Buckley

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.

Author: Charles Bukowski

Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius.

Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity and truth accomplishes no victories without it.

Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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.

Author: Martin Buren

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.

Author: Leo Burnett

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

Author: Ken Burns

The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.

Author: Sid Caesar

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Author: Thomas Carlyle

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.

Author: Ron Chernow

The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.

Author: Lydia Child

Genius is of no country.

Author: Charles Churchill

Genius is independent of situation.

Author: Charles Churchill

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

Author: Winston Churchill

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.

Author: J. Clark

To be complex does not mean to be fragmented. This is the paradox and the genius of our Canadian civilization.

Author: Adrienne Clarkson

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.

Author: George Clooney

Ismail Merchant was just the most seductive, passionate, outrageous, driven, genius of a man.

Author: Glenn Close

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.

Author: Samuel Coleridge

To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.

Author: Samuel Coleridge

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.

Author: Charles Colton

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.

Author: Alex Cox

Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.

Author: Edward Dahlberg

Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.

Author: Robertson Davies

Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation.

Author: John Denham

The general interest of the masses might take the place of the insight of genius if it were allowed freedom of action.

Author: Denis Diderot

Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.

Author: Denis Diderot

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.

Author: Dietrich Dieskau

Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe.

Author: Benjamin Disraeli

Genius, when young, is divine.

Author: Benjamin Disraeli

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

Author: Benjamin Disraeli

Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.

Author: Benjamin Disraeli

Genius must be born, and never can be taught.

Author: John Dryden

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.

Author: Andrea Dworkin

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Author: Thomas Edison

His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.

Author: Thomas Edison

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

Author: Albert Einstein

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.

Author: Albert Einstein

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.

Author: George Eliot

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

Author: George Eliot

Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.

Author: Havelock Ellis

The first Matrix genius, the second one, what's up with the dancing? I haven't even seen the third one.

Author: Ethan Embry

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

Author: Ralph Emerson

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

Author: Ralph Emerson

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

Author: Ralph Emerson

The lucky person passes for a genius.

Author: Euripides

Nietzsche claimed that his genius was in his nostrils and I think that is a very excellent place for it to be.

Author: Federico Fellini

Taste is the feminine of genius.

Author: Edward Fitzgerald

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

Author: F. Fitzgerald

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.

Author: Gustave Flaubert

Genius is another word for magic, and the whole point of magic is that it is inexplicable.

Author: Margot Fonteyn

To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius.

Author: Lukas Foss

Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.

Author: R. Fuller

You don't have to be a political genius to sniff the smell of blood in the water.

Author: Rich Galen

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.

Author: Jose Gasset

Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.

Author: Edward Gibbon

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.

Author: Todd Gitlin

Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.

Author: William Godwin

Common sense is the genius of humanity.

Author: Johann Goethe

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.

Author: Oliver Goldsmith

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

Author: Samuel Goldwyn

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.

Author: Paul Goodman

The genius of the American system is that through freedom we have created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people.

Author: Phil Gramm

Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.

Author: Robert Graves

Commerce changes the fate and genius of nations.

Author: Thomas Gray

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.

Author: Paul Harris

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.

Author: B. Hayden

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.

Author: Benjamin Haydon

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.

Author: William Hazlitt

Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.

Author: William Hazlitt

Dandyism is a variety of genius.

Author: William Hazlitt

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.

Author: Heinrich Heine

Genius is nothing but continued attention.

Author: Claude Helvetius

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.

Author: Robert Henri

Is it not in the most absolute simplicity that real genius plies its pinions the most wonderfully?

Author: E. Hoffmann

Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.

Author: Anthony Hope

Unless you are a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.

Author: Anthony Hope

Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.

Author: Horace

A host is like a general: calamities often reveal his genius.

Author: Horace

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

Author: Elbert Hubbard

The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.

Author: Victor Hugo

Taste is the common sense of genius.

Author: Victor Hugo

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Author: Victor Hugo

In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.

Author: Robert Ingersoll

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.

Author: Washington Irving

Genius is initiative on fire.

Author: Holbrook Jackson

The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.

Author: William James

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

Author: William James

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.

Author: Lyndon Johnson

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.

Author: Samuel Johnson

It's a lucky child that knows that they're a genius, unaimed and all that.

Author: Diana Jones

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.

Author: Diana Jones

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.

Author: Diana Jones

Genius is a word too often tossed around in musical circles.

Author: Stanley Jordan

Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.

Author: Joseph Joubert

A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

Author: James Joyce

The media works in sound bites. They can make you look like a genius or stupid.

Author: Kato Kaelin

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.

Author: Harvey Keitel

Gene Roddenberry was a genius.

Author: Persis Khambatta

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.

Author: Nigel Kneale

The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

Author: Arthur Koestler

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.

Author: Kathe Kollwitz

Genius is an overused word. The world has known only about a half dozen geniuses. I got only fairly near.

Author: Fritz Kreisler

Man is a genius when he is dreaming.

Author: Akira Kurosawa

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.

Author: Joseph Lancaster

Who makes quick use of the moment is a genius of prudence.

Author: Johann Lavater

He who seldom speaks, and with one calm well-timed word can strike dumb the loquacious, is a genius or a hero.

Author: Johann Lavater

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.

Author: Jude Law

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.

Author: Irving Layton

There is no off position on the genius switch.

Author: David Letterman

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Author: Oscar Levant

Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.

Author: George Lewes

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Author: Georg Lichtenberg

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.

Author: Rush Limbaugh