On Genius Quotes

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

We, the salt of the earth, should endeavor to follow, by never letting anything disturb us in the pursuit of our intellectual life, however much the storm of the world may invade and agitate our personal environment. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Some were brilliant bordering on genius. Others, genius bordering on madness ~ Erich Segal

After upwards of two thousand years Epicurus has been exonerated from the reproach that the doctrines of his philosophy recommended the pleasures of sensuality and voluptuousness as the chief good. Calumny may rest on genius a considerable part of a world's duration; what then is the value of fame? ~ William Benton Clulow

Genius only leaves behind it the monuments of its strength. ~ William Hazlitt

A book becomes a mirror, with the author's face shining over it. Talent only gives an imperfect image,
the broken glimmer of a countenance. But the features of genius remain unruffled. Time guards the shadow. Beauty, the spiritual, Venus,
whose children are the Tassos, the Spensers, the Bacons,
breathes, the magic of her love, and fixes the face forever. ~ Robert Aris Willmott

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

Towering genius disdains a beaten path ... It sees no distinction in adding story to story ... It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it ... ~ Abraham Lincoln

Genius is Omniscience flowing into man. ~ Wallace D. Wattles

Without any extraordinary effort of genius, I have discovered that nature was the same three thousand years ago as at present; that men were but men then as well as now; that modes and customs vary often, but that human nature is always the same. And I can no more suppose, that men were better, braver, or wiser, fifteen hundred or three thousand years ago, than I can suppose that the animals or vegetables were better than they are now. ~ Lord Chesterfield

What makes a genius? The ability to see. To see what? The butterfly in a caterpillar, the eagle in an egg, the saint in a selfish person, life in death, unity in separation,
God in the human and human in God and suffering as the form in which the incomprehensibility of God himself appears. ~ Brennan Manning

It doesn't actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they've had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run. ~ Gore Vidal

Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum ) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be. ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars. ~ Aristotle.

If a great mansion is located in a wrong environment, it loses its real value! So it is, when a great and true genius fails to get the right stage, its real value is least seen! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Hunger is the handmaid of genius ~ Mark Twain

When I was about twelve I used to think I must be a genius, but nobody's noticed. If there is such a thing as a genius, I am one, and if there isn't I don't care. ~ John Lennon

Madness, genius, originality - it's all the same thing; it's a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one. ~ Malcolm Bradbury

One wants in a Prime Minister a good many things, but not very great things. He should be clever but need not be a genius; he should be conscientious but by no means strait-laced; he should be cautious but never timid, bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all, a thick skin. ~ Anthony Trollope

Genius, when employed in works whose tendency it is to demoralize and to degrade us, should be contemplated with abhorrence rather than with admiration; such a monument of its power, may indeed be stamped with immortality, but like the Coliseum at Rome, we deplore its magnificence because we detest the purposes for which it was designed. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights and I am not against supplying such lures if they draw children into even a transient concern with science. But every classroom has one [Oliver] Sacks , one [Eric] Korn, or one [Jonathan] Miller , usually a lonely child with a passionate curiosity about nature, and a zeal that overcomes pressures for conformity. Do not the one in fifty deserve their institutions as well magic places, like cabinet museums, that can spark the rare flames of genius? ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Claim whatever you want. Say you only want a happy family or a successful career or a big house. I say: no, that's not what you want. You'll settle for those things, but you really want a monkey that does your evil bidding. Pullman is a genius just for this. ~ Maureen Johnson

Find out what people want to do, then tell them to do it. They'll think you're a genius. ~ Connie Brockway

I never worried about the genius: genius takes care of the genius in a man. My concern was always for the nobody, the man who is lost in the shuffle, the man who is so common, so ordinary, that his presence is not even noticed. One genius does not inspire another. ~ Henry Miller

This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called "the unsayable said." If ~ Kim Addonizio

For style beyond the genius never dares. ~ Petrarch

And if the prodigious genius of Azarya Sheiner has never found the solution, then perhaps that is proof that no solution exists, that the most gifted among us is feeble in mind against the brutality of incomprehensibility that assutalts us from all sides. And so we try, as best we cn, to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence. And so we live, as best we can, for ourselves, or who will live for us? And we live, as best we can, for others, otherwise what are we? ~ Rebecca Goldstein

The oft-heard comment that Leonardo [da Vinci]'s genius managed to transcend the culture of his time is amply justified. But his was not a science-fiction voyage into the future as much as a plunge into the past. ~ Lucio Russo

Latent genius is but a presumption. Everything that can be, is bound to come into being, and what never comes into being is nothing. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

The genius of capitalism consists precisely in its lack of morality. Unless he is rich enough to hire his own choir, a capitalist is a fellow who, by definition, can ill afford to believe in anything other than the doctrine of the bottom line. Deprive a capitalist of his God-given right to lie and cheat and steal, and the poor sap stands a better than even chance of becoming one of the abominable wards of the state from whose grimy fingers the Reagan Administration hopes to snatch the ark of democracy. ~ Lewis H. Lapham

Genius does not excuse evil. ~ Rick Riordan

American musicians, instead of investigating ragtime, attempt to ignore it, or dismiss it with a contemptuous word. But that has always been the course of scholasticism in every branch of art. Whatever new thing the 'people' like is poohpoohed; whatever is 'popular' is spoken of as not worth the while. The fact is, nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best that he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius. ~ James Weldon Johnson

Man is a genius when he dreams. Dream what you are capable of. The harder you dream it, the sooner it will come true. ~ Akira Kurosawa

To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,
To raise the genius, and to mend the heart ~ Alexander Pope

A fish doesn't need swimming gear when you throw it into the ocean. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

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