Genius - Quotes

A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind. - William James

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. - James Joyce

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot. - Charles Bukowski

Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows. - Havelock Ellis

Every man who observes vigilantly, and resolves steadfastly, grows unconsciously into genius. - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

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

From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light. Like those extraordinary stars of whose origins we are ignorant, and of whose fate, once they have vanished, we know even less, such men have neither forebears nor descendants: they are the whole of their race. - Jean de La Bruyere

Genius ain’t anything more than elegant common sense. - Josh Billings

Genius always looks forward, and not only sees what is, but what necessarily will be. - Fluke Greville

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do. - W. H. Auden

Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them. - Joseph Joubert

Genius has oftenest been the pariah of his time, the unhoused god whom none cared for, unnamed till they whom he first promoted, enriched and honoured, found it honourable to own their benefactor. - Amos Bronson Alcott

Genius holds its universal dominion because it touches the deepest suggestions and utters the multiform experiences of a common nature. - E. H. Chapin

Genius is a steed too fiery for the plow or the cart. - Henry Ward Beecher

Genius is but fine observation strengthened by fixity of purpose. - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they know more. - Henry Ford

Genius is knowing to stay silent as others demonstrate their ignorance. - Eric Lau

Genius is mainly an affair of energy. - Matthew Arnold

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one. - E. B. White

Genius is naught but a greater aptitude for patience. - Comte de Buffon

Genius is often only the power of making continuous efforts. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it – so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it. How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success. - Elbert Hubbard

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. - Thomas Alva Edison

Genius is only a greater aptitude for patience. - George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon

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

Genius is talent set on fire by courage. - Henry van Dyke

Genius is the ability to receive from the universe. - I Ching

Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple. - C.W Ceran

Genius is the accumulated wealth of our humanity – its most intense development concentrated at one point, and then with clearer expression and with mysterious power shot back to us across the galvanic lines of thought and feeling. - E. H. Chapin

Genius makes its observations in short hand; talent writes them out at length. - Christian Nestell Bovee

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

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

Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers. - Robert Graves

Genius without Education is like Silver in the Mine. - Benjamin Franklin

Genius begins great works; labour alone finishes them. - Joseph Joubert

Genius is only the power of making continuous efforts. - Elbert Hubbard

Genius is the capacity for taking infinite pains. - Thomas Carlyle

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. - William James

GENIUS, like a planet, takes a wide circuit through the pure expanse of nature, and visits not regions only, but whole worlds, which SENSE does not know to exist. - Fluke Greville

Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use. - William Hazlitt

If you are a genius and unsuccessful, everybody treats you as if you were a genius, but when you come to be successful, when you commence to earn money, when you are really successful, then your family and everybody no longer treats you like a genius, they treat you like a man who has become successful. - Pablo Picasso

Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also. - Fyodor Dostoevsky

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

Maybe that was what genius was: the knack of seeing the obvious through its obscure curtain of irrelevancies. - K. J. Parker

Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject at hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night, it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort which I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit if genius. It is the fruit of labour and thought. - Alexander Hamilton

Men of genius supply the substance of history, while the mass of men are but the critical filter, the limiting, slackening, passive force needed for the modification of ideas supplied by genius. - Henri-Frederic Amiel

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go into the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius. - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

No great genius is without an admixture of madness. - Aristotle

One might expect, perhaps, that a man full of genius could pasture in the greatness of his own thoughts, and renounce the cheap approbation of the crowd which he despises; yet he succumbs to the more powerful impulse of the herd instinct. His searching and his finding, his call, belong to the herd. - Carl Jung

One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire. - Eliza Cook

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

People are often dazzled by the show of genius by others, not knowing that they too have it somewhere in themselves. - Unknown

Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius. - Benjamin Disraeli

Society has come to be somewhat perversely suspicious of the genius, almost as if there is something rather unjust about being unusually speedy in a person’s mental growth. - Unknown

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius, the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. - Sherlock Holmes
The difference between genius and stupidity is; genius has its limits. - Albert Einstein

Sometimes a single word, spoken by the voice of genius, goes far into the heart. A hint, a suggestion, an undefined delicacy of expression, teaches us more than we gather from volumes of less gifted men. - William E. Channing

The best genius is that which absorbs and assimilates everything without doing the least violence to its fundamental destiny. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honoured so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end. - Charles Caleb Colton

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

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

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm. - Aldous Huxley

The stakes are immense, the task colossal, the time is short. But we may hope – we must hope – that man’s own creation, man’s own genius, will not destroy him. - Albert Einstein

The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius. - Amy Lowell

There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius. - Arthur Helps

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man – but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not sooner or later responded. - James Russell Lowell

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness. - Aristotle

These are the prerogatives of genius: To know without having learned; to draw just conclusions from unknown premises; to discern the soul of things. - Ambrose Bierce

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered – either by themselves or by others. - Mark Twain

To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius – the men of reasoning and the men of imagination. - Isaac D’Israeli

To wake up the genius within your mind, you must first believe there is a genius residing there. - Unknown

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. - Abraham Lincoln

We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals. - Saul Bellow

We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or other people’s models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open. - Unknown

Who in the same given time can produce more than many others, has vigour; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius. - Johann Caspar Lavater