Genius Quotes

1. "These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman."
Author: Abigail Adams

2. "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..."
Author: Abraham Lincoln

3. "Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius."
Author: Albert Pike

4. "The genius of a great magician is as impressive as the genius of a great scientist."
Author: Amit Kalantri

5. "People link the heart to stupidity. They say the heart wants what it wants; it is foolish and driven. They play the victim and blame their emotions for every pain they suffer. The truth is that we own our body.. Therefore we own our heart and it will feel whatever we attract to it. Be certain that the heart you call stupid has greater sense of intuition than brilliant minds combined. It aches, dreams, hates, loves independently; while the rest of your body awaits signals from the brain to function. The heart is the lighthouse that guides all our senses and it is the essence of our humanity. That is why when they say "follow your heart" it is never easy; because by doing so you've made a choice to follow a natural unexplainable genius that is beyond your comprehension."
Author: Asrarabdulghani

6. "Those whom nature destined to make her disciples have no need of teachers. Bacon, Descartes, Newton — these tutors of the human race had no need of tutors themselves, and what guides could have led them to those places where their vast genius carried them? Ordinary teachers could only have limited their understanding by confining it to their own narrow capabilities. With the first obstacles, they learned to exert themselves and made the effort to traverse the immense space they moved through. If it is necessary to permit some men to devote themselves to the study of the sciences and the arts, that should be only for those who feel in themselves the power to walk alone in those men's footsteps and to move beyond them. It is the task of this small number of people to raise monuments to the glory of the human mind."
Author: Bacon

7. "Capitalism did not merely enslave the workers, it also vitiated taste and vulgarized intellect: hence our educational system and hence the lack of 'Recognition' for new genius."
Author: C.S. Lewis

8. "Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."
Author: Calvin Coolidge

9. "Before you can tame your genius spirit, you have to find her."
Author: Carolyn Elliott

10. "As we dreamers make our souls into evolved fields, our genius is nutured and our presence and everything we create becomes charged and capable of positively altering the fields of others. In this process, we become more essentially human-which is to say, paradoxically, more divine."
Author: Carolyn Elliott

11. "What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another."
Author: D.H. Lawrence

12. "Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien."
Author: Edward Dahlberg

13. "Moody had no small genius for the art of diplomacy. As a child he had known instinctively that it was always better to tell a partial truth with a willing aspect than to tell a perfect truth in a defensive way."
Author: Eleanor Catton

14. "Since when was genius found respectable?"
Author: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

15. "He said he couldn't understand a world 'shameless and cruel enough to divide its people by color when color is in fact the sign of God's artistic genius."
Author: Frances Mayes

16. "When your efforts run in the face of conventional wisdom and accepted mastery, persistence can look like madness. If you succeed in the end, this extreme originality reformulates into a new level of mastery, sometimes even genius; if you fail in the end, you remain a madman in the eyes of others, and maybe even yourself. When you are in the midst of the journey…there's really no way of knowing which one you are." (p.129)"
Author: Hilary Austen

17. "Olivier was another case of a genius, who couldn't understand why anybody would have any trouble doing this, because for him it came so easily."
Author: James Lipton

18. "[…] but I remember I preferred the soldier to the philosopher at the time; a preference which life has only confirmed. One was a man, and the other was either more – or less. However, they are both dead, and Mrs Beard is dead, and youth, strength, genius, thoughts, achievements, simple hearts – all dies… No matter."
Author: Joseph Conrad

19. "There's a fine mascara line between genius and insanity"
Author: Josh Stern

20. "WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius."
Author: Julian Barnes

21. "One of the cheapest commodities in the world is unfulfilled genius. All of us want to be known as a unique individual, the one who broke out of the pack. So, you offer yourself up as a sacrifice and what you're afraid of is losing and being thrown back into the pack. One question taunts you. Do you want to have, or do you want to be?"
Author: Leon Uris

22. "A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us."
Author: Marcel Proust

23. "Culture and tradition have to change little by little. So 'new' means a little twist, a marriage of Japanese technique with French ingredients. My technique. Indian food, Korean food; I put Italian mozzarella cheese with sashimi. I don't think 'new new new.' I'm not a genius. A little twist."
Author: Masaharu Morimoto

24. "Genius is the talent for seeing things straight."
Author: Maude Adams

25. "The Didots created happiness and power, or in this case, pain and sadness...but only within its subject's mind. The power it held was real, but it was not a physical power. It was the power of persuasion, the power of illusion. Mr. Bradshaw was a genius."
Author: Maya Bode

26. "Deserts look beautiful and green fields look beautiful too. Nature is genius because it knows how to look beautiful in every way."
Author: Mehmet Murat Ildan

27. "Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness."
Author: Michel De Montaigne

28. "A genius is simply one who has taken full possession of his own mind and directed it toward objectives of his own choosing, without permitting outside influences to discourage or mislead him."
Author: Napoleon Hill

29. "I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works."
Author: Oscar Wilde

30. "Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed."
Author: P.T. Barnum

31. "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 greatness, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

32. "Genius is religious."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

33. "He was a young man of savage & unexpected originality, a diseased genius & quite frankly, a mad genius. Imbeciles grow insane & in their insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or agitated; in the madness of a man of genius some genius often remains: the form & not the quality of intelligence has been affected; the fruit has been bruised in the fall, but has preserved all its perfume & all the savor of its pulp, hardly too ripe."
Author: Remy De Gourmont

34. "Clinton's fakery was so deft and deeply ingrained that it was impossible to tell where it ended and the real Bill Clinton began. This constituted a kind of political genius."
Author: Rich Lowry

35. "I wouldn't stop until I figured the damn thing out–it would take me fifteen or twenty minutes. But during the day, other guys would come to me with the same problem, and I'd do it for them in a flash. So for one guy, to do it took me twenty minutes, while there were five guys who thought I was a super-genius."
Author: Richard P. Feynman

36. "Many now born, by the time they are voters will compose part of a nation with a genius nowhere equaled, and with a vast territory upon which those energies and that genius can operate."
Author: Richard Parks Bland

37. "A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses."
Author: Robert Musil

38. "It is quite possible for the vulgar to be funny, but to succeed, it must rise to a certain genius."
Author: Roger Ebert

39. "I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster. … The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That's genius."
Author: Sam Shepard

40. "Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm. It is the real allegory of the myth of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it."
Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

41. "The greatest form of genius is that which isn't noticed."
Author: Scott Nicholson

42. "No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness."
Author: Seneca

43. "I'm the archetype of a disabled genius, or should I say a physically challenged genius, to be politically correct. At least I'm obviously physically challenged. Whether I'm a genius is more open to doubt."
Author: Stephen Hawking

44. "Stay Stupid The three dumbest guys I can think of: Charles Lindbergh, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill. Why? Because any smart person who understood how impossibly arduous were the tasks they had set themselves would have pulled the plug before he even began. Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur's indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway. How do we achieve this state of mind? By staying stupid. By not allowing ourselves to think. A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It's only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate. Don't think. Act."
Author: Steven Pressfield

45. "With genius, as with beauty -- all, well almost all, is forgiven."
Author: Susan Sontag

46. "His dad said even the cavemen had geniuses among them. Somebody had thought up the wheel."
Author: Suzanne Collins

47. "People with no experience of life except under communist regimes would tell me that they knew—though they were unsure how—that their life was not ‘natural,' just as Winston Smith concludes that life in Airstrip One (the new name for England in 1984) was unnatural. Other ways of life might have their problems, my Albanian and Rumanian friends would say, but theirs was unique in its violation of human nature. Orwell's imaginative grasp of what it was like to live under communism seemed to them, as it does to me, to amount to genius."
Author: Theodore Dalrymple

48. "Pain is definitely a genius in his own right. 'Thr33 Ringz' is definitely one of my top 10 albums. It's one of those albums you listen to front-to-back."
Author: Travie McCoy

49. "The obvious differences apart, Karl Marx was no more a reliable prophet than was the Reverend Jim Jones. Karl Marx was a genius, an uncannily resourceful manipulator of world history who shoved everything he knew, thought, and devised into a Ouija board from whose movements he decocted universal laws. He had his following, during the late phases of the Industrial Revolution. But he was discredited by historical experience longer ago than the Wizard of Oz: and still, great grown people sit around, declare themselves to be Marxists, and make excuses for Gulag and Afghanistan."
Author: William F. Buckley Jr.

50. "Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play."
Author: William Saroyan

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