Genius Quotes

Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.

If there be anything that can be called genius, it consists chiefly in ability to give that attention to a subject which keeps it steadily in the mind, till we have surveyed it accurately on all sides.

The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.

A man possesses talent; genius possesses the man.

Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.

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

You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.

The genius which runs to madness is no longer genius.

Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature.

Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.

This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

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

There are very few men of genius in advertising agencies. But we need all we can find. Almost without exception they are disagreeable. Don't destroy them. They lay golden eggs.

Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.

Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

Genius is initiative on fire.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.

Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect idea that they subsequently express with their hands.

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Many men of genius must arise before a particular man of genius can appear.

To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.

Genius, scholar, and war hero though he is, you have to admit - or maybe you should think about admitting - that George Bush might have rushed things a little in invading Iraq.

I was induced to establish several orders of merit, from conviction that emulation, well directed, becomes a useful servant; and, that the latent genius of some youth is more easily brought into action this way, than by the more sordid gratification of self-interest.

To be complex does not mean to be fragmented. This is the paradox and the genius of our Canadian civilization.