Genius Quotes
My dear boy, no woman is a genius. They are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.James Joyce
Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering pot and the pruning knife.Margaret Fulle
Probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for perhaps those times when Thomas Jefferson ate alone.John F. Kennedy, Describing a dinner for Nobel Prize winners, 1962
The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously; and those who have produced immortal works, have done so without knowing how or why. The greatest power operates unseen.William Hazlitt
Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.Samuel Taylor Coleridge
First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.Johann von Goethe
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.Dwight D. Eisenhowe
Be you in what line of life you may, it will be amongst your misfortunes if you have not time properly to attend to pecuniary monetary matters. Want of attention to these matters has impeded the progress of science and of genius itself.William Cobbett
Talk not of genius baffled, Genius is master of man. Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can.E. R. Bulwer - Lytton, Last Words (1860)
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
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.Aristotle
Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.Joe Theismann, Former quarterback
Genius is childhood recaptured.Bauldlaire
Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character, and one of the best instruments of success. Without it genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies.Philip Dormer Chesterfield
It is not because the touch of genius has roused genius to production, but because the admiration of genius has made talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant.Margaret Fulle
Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the Headless Monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.Sir Charles Spencer Charlie Chaplin
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.Wystan Hugh Auden
If confusion is the first step to knowledge, I must be a genius.Larry Leissne
Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.Benjamin Disraeli
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam that flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his own thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts they come back to us with a sort of alienated majesty.Ralph Waldo Emerson
He was a genius - That is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.Robertson Davies, "Fifth Business".
The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.Ralph Waldo Emerson
What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea - Possessing them - That what has been said has still not been said enough.Eugene Delacroix
Genius is born - - Not paid.Oscar Wilde
There is no genius free from some tincture of madness.Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius.Robert A. Heinlein
Genius without education is like silver in the mine.Benjamin Franklin
Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.Edgard Varese
He attacked everything in life with a mix of extrordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.Douglas Adams
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - That is genius.Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.F Scott
Talent finds its models, methods, and ends in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own end, and draws its means and the style of its architecture from within.Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Method of Nature (1841)
Common sense is as rare as genius.Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
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
Crazy people who are productive are geniuses. Crazy people who are rich are eccentric. Crazy people who are neither productive nor rich are just plain crazy. Geniuses and crazy people are both out in the middle of a deep ocean geniuses swim, crazy people drown. Most of us are sitting safely on the shore. Take a chance and get your feet wet.Michael J. Gel
