Misunderstood Genius Quotes

Even if there are instances in which it can be mistook by onlookers, never fool yourself into using misunderstood genius as an excuse to be a fool. ~ Criss Jami

Dying is the fastest route to fame for an aspiring rock star. The dead man's melodies become profound, acquiring deep mystery and rising into a realm beyond the reach of human criticism. In the stopping of a heartbeat, the rocker is transformed from decadent, depraved hedonist into misunderstood genius. Aye, death and musical stardom go together like Scotland and rain. ~ Mark Rice

I feel Aleister Crowley is a misunderstood genius of the 20th century. Because his whole thing was liberation of the person, of the entity, and that restrictions would foul you up, lead to frustration which leads to violence, crime, mental breakdown, depending on what sort of makeup you have underneath. The further this age we're in now gets into technology and alienation, a lot of the points he's made seem to manifest themselves all down the line. ~ Jimmy Page

Paugh!" the troll scoffed. "Romance. Kissing and folly. Where's the story, where's the philosophy? I'm a troll, and even I can't rip a bodice. You should read real literature. The classics." He held up a book called Ye Olde Clubbe of Fisticuffs. "This is one of my favorites. It's all about, like, rejecting capitalism." He held up another, the spine as yet uncracked, called Alliance of Nincompoops. "Or this one, about a misunderstood genius. You should read it. I'd love to chat about what the true meaning of success is when we're living in a world that values looks instead of substance. ~ Delilah S. Dawson

I'm a misunderstood genius. ~ Bill Watterson

Michael Jackson? He was something more (than one of my favorite entertainers), a true friend. He wasn't just a genius. Above all, he was a good person, who gave so much. He gave people values, he encouraged them to better themselves all the time. He was far deeper and more authentic than people could see. He was misunderstood too many times ~ Kobe Bryant

And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths. ~ Antonin Artaud

Loki, that's me. Loki, the Light-Bringer, the misunderstood, the elusive, the handsome and modest hero of this particular tissue of lies. ~ Joanne Harris

You were born a genius, choose to write your success story. ~ Anyaele Sam Chiyson

Even the genius ask questions. ~ Tupac Shakur

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

Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Creativity is the highest form of intelligence. Over time, after developing a more advanced creative brain, I started feeling that my college education was more so something to be ashamed of rather than something to be proud of. ~ Criss Jami

Evil genius! I so admire that in a person. Usually I'm the evil bitch of the group ~ Maya Banks

Well, the gold fish in the bowl lay upside down bloating
Full in the sky and the plains were bleached white with skeletons
Various species grouped together according
To their past beliefs
The only way they ever all got together was
Not in love but shameful grief ~ Don Van Vliet

I am sure that few successful men are so-called 'natural geniuses.' ~ Charles M. Schwab

Humility is even more pleasing in people in whom arrogance would be understandable. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It is not the genius at the top giving directions that makes people great. It is great people that make the guy at the top look like a genius. ~ Simon Sinek

A genius is someone who can tolerate the discomfort of uncertainty while generating as many ideas as possible. ~ Marty Neumeier

Being a stranger was like being dead,
and brought to mind how, in a book he had read
that most folks misunderstood one common state:
The flip side of love is indifference, not hate. ~ David Rakoff

She had realized there are only fragments, that 'memories' always consist of fragments the mind puts together into a pattern, adapts a picture staked out early without the need for a conenction with anything that really happened. A great deal is misunderstood by small children, then stored as images that attract similar images, confirming and reinforcing. ~ Marianne Fredriksson

Lots of talk lately about the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL that seems to be exclusively masculine. And how many of the characters in the GENIUS BOOKS are likable? Is Holden Caulfield likable? Is Meursault in The Stranger? Is Henry Miller? Is any character in any of these system novels particularly likable? Aren't they usually loathsome but human, etc., loathsome and neurotic and obsessed? In my memory, all the characters in Jonathan Franzen are total douchebags (I know, I know, I'm not supposed to use that, feminine imagery, whatever, but it is SO satisfying to say and think). How about female characters in the genius books? Was Madame Bovary likable? Was Anna Karenina? Is Daisy Buchanan likable? Is Daisy Miller? Is it the specific way in which supposed readers HATE unlikable female characters (who are too depressed, too crazy, too vain, too self-involved, too bored, too boring), that mirrors the specific way in which people HATE unlikable girls and women for the same qualities? We do not allow, really, the notion of the antiheroine, as penned by women, because we confuse the autobiographical, and we pass judgment on the female author for her terrible self-involved and indulgent life. We do not hate Scott Fitzgerald in "The Crack-Up" or Georges Bataille in Guilty for being drunken and totally wading in their own pathos, but Jean Rhys is too much of a victim. ~ Kate Zambreno

Consequently, the value and importance of the monarchic idea cannot reside in the person of the monarch himself except if Heaven decides to lay the crown on the brow of the heroic genius like Frederick the Great or a wise character like William I. ~ Adolf Hitler

The denial of contemporary genius is the rule rather than the exception. No one counts the eagles in the nest, till there is a rush of wings; and lo! they are flown. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

There is a question that has been haunting me,' he replied over the sound of the first horns announcing column formation. 'How does a mortal win over a god? Has it ever happened before, even? Has the old order been overturned? Or is this just … special circumstance? A moment unique in all of history?'

'You have won the Worm of Autumn to her cause, Priest?'

At Lostara's question, Banaschar frowned. He studied her for a moment, and then glanced at Ruthan Gudd. 'You look shocked,' he said to him. 'Is it that I somehow possessed that power? Or is it the very idea that what we do in this mortal world – with our lives, with our will – could make a god kneel before us?' Then he shook his head. 'But you both misunderstood me. I was not speaking of myself at all. I cannot win over a god, even when I am the last priest in that god's House. Don't you understand? It's her. She did it. Not me.'

'She spoke to your god?'

Banaschar grunted. 'No, Lostara. She rarely speaks at all – you of all people should know that by now. No. Instead, she simply refused to waver from her path, and by that alone she has humbled the gods. Do you understand me? Humbled them.'

Ruthan Gudd shook his head. 'The gods are too arrogant to ever be humbled.'

'A year ago, lying drunk on my cot, I would have agreed with you, Captain. So tell me now, will you fight for her?'

His eyes were thinned as he studied Banaschar, and then he said, 'With ~ Steven Erikson

The wettest, weirdest environment is human interaction. Whatever we build gets misunderstood, corroded and chronic, and it happens quickly and in unpredictable ways. That's one reason why the web is so fascinating-it's a collision between the analytic world of code and wet world of people. ~ Seth Godin

There's a difference between thinking you can't be wrong and having no regrets. Wrongness is what occurs prior to empiricism, in hindsight a counterpart of revelation, and revelation is nothing to regret. ~ Criss Jami

Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country - bigger than all the Presidents together.
We are still too near to his greatness,' (Leo) Tolstoy (in 1908) concluded, 'but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.' (748) ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

Genius has no sex ~ Germaine De Stael

I don't know how smart I am, but I was a student of the game and I still watch games and still pick up things. If you watch individual players you will see genius. ~ Tony DiCicco

The third quality that is needed for a scientist to become a public icon is wisdom. Besides being a famous joker and a famous genius, Feynman was also a wise human being whose answers to serious questions made sense. ~ Freeman Dyson

As in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first brought to light. ~ Herman Melville

I had taken the photograph from afar (distance being the basic glitch in our relationship), using my Nikon and zoom lens while hiding behind a fake marble pillar. I was hiding because if he knew I'd been secretly photographing him for all these months he would think I was immature, neurotic and obsessive.
I'm not.
I'm an artist.
Artists are always misunderstood.(Thwonk) ~ Joan Bauer

George Saunders is a complete genius. ~ Bill Hader

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

I love the beginning of Magnolia, the thing about the dealer. That scene is genius. Brilliantly acted. ~ Patton Oswalt

And crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples. The Negro thus educated is a hopeless liability of the race. ~ Carter G. Woodson

She had come to terms with her lack of beauty, but never with her lack of genius in the single thing she had ever wanted. ~ Barbara Hambly

...maybe being an artist is also really about the work. It's not about standing up and trumpeting one's own genius to a throng of adoring inferiors, agog with admiration. Maybe an artist is simply one who does an artist's work, over and over. A process, not a paragon. ~ Olivia Waite

Its culture: the fruit of its life, the product of its own efforts in thought and art. This culture is not international. It is the expression of the national genius, of the blood. The culture is international in its brilliance but national in origin. Someone made a fine comparison: bread and wheat may be internationally consumed, but they always bear the imprint of the soil from which they came. ~ Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

What are the heights, and depths, and lengths, of human science, with all the boasted acquisitions of the brightest genius of mankind! Learning and science can measure the globe, can sound the depths of the sea, can compass the heavens, can mete out the distances of the sun and moon, and mark out the path of every twinkling star for many ages past, or ages to come; but they cannot acquaint us with the way of salvation from this long, this endless distress. What are all the sublime reasonings of philosophers upon the abstruse and most difficult subjects? What is the whole circle of sciences which human wit and thought can trace out and comprehend? Can they deliver us from the guilt of one sin? Can they free us from one of the terrors of the Almighty? Can they assuage the torment of a wounded spirit, or guard us from the impressions of divine indignation? Alas, they are all but trifles in comparison of this blessed Gospel, which saves us from eternal anguish and death.

It is the Gospel that teaches us the holy skill to prevent this worm of conscience from gnawing the soul, and instructs us how to kill it in the seed and first springs of it, to mortify the corruptions of the heart, to resist the temptations of Satan, and where to wash away the guilt of sin. It is this blessed Gospel that clearly discovers to us how we may guard against the fire of divine wrath, or rather how to secure our souls from becoming the fuel of it. It is this Book that teaches us to sprinkle ~ Isaac Watts

Unlike his sometime rival Tariq Ramadan, who'd been tainted by his old Trotskyite connections, Ben Abbes had kept his distance from the anticapitalist left. He understood that the pro-growth right had won the "war of ideas," that young people today had become entrepreneurs, and that no one saw any alternative to the free market. But his real stroke of genius was to grasp that elections would no longer be about the economy but about values, and that here, too, the right was about to win the "war of ideas" without a fight. ~ Michel Houellebecq

A genius is the one most like himself. ~ Thelonious Monk

I would touch its walls with my fingers and its ceilings with my looks, I would invoke the powers of writing, I would bathe my soul in the rivers of unknown thoughts that genius unrolls when surrounded by the song of all the books its heart receives the marvelous measures of its own speech ... ~ Helene Cixous

We all understand that genius doesn't guarantee success, but it's seductive to assume that success must come from genius. ~ Leonard Mlodinow

When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them. ~ Criss Jami

Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

What an ornament and safeguard is humor! Far better than wit for a poet and writer. It is a genius itself, and so defends from the insanities. ~ Walter Scott

The French dine to gratify, we to appease appetite," observed John Sanderson. "We demolish dinner, they eat it." The general misconception back home was that French food was highly seasoned, but not at all, wrote James Fenimore Cooper. The genius in French cookery was "in blending flavors and in arranging compounds in such a manner as to produce ... the lightest and most agreeable food." The charm of a French dinner, like so much in French life, was the "effect. ~ David McCullough

To see every day how people get the name 'genius' just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name 'millipede'-not because they have that many feet, but because most people don't want to count to 14-this has had the result that I don't believe anyone any more without checking. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

Genius is a strong aphrodisiac. ~ Erica Jong

Knowledge does not equate to intelligence. It is the application of knowledge that separates the genius from the fool. ~ Niquenya D. Fulbright

I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man. ~ Albert Camus