Genius Quotes

Which is why, in my lieder concerts, I always strove, when possible, to sing only the works of a single composer, so that the audience could be gradually drawn into a particular creative genius' way of thinking, and could follow him.

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

I have learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

The lucky person passes for a genius.

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.

In Mozart and Salieri we see the contrast between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does what it can.

In our own time it has been seen... that simple children, roughly brought up in the wilderness, have begun to draw by themselves, impelled by their own natural genius, instructed solely by the example of these beautiful paintings and sculptures of Nature.

The first Matrix genius, the second one, what's up with the dancing? I haven't even seen the third one.

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.

He who seldom speaks, and with one calm well-timed word can strike dumb the loquacious, is a genius or a hero.

A genius is one who can do anything except make a living.

Man is a genius when he is dreaming.

Action, so to speak, is the genius of nature.

The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement.

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.

And I think it is the genius of actors to be able to escape whatever people are expecting of them. Otherwise you become like a factory worker.

President Obama's view of a free economy is to send your money to his friends. My vision for a free enterprise economy is to return entrepreneurship and genius and creativity to the American people!

People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

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

When you work in the United States Senate, and you are around people of all different ideas and beliefs, you realize that what our Founding Fathers did that was so genius, is that they made the Senate the place where compromises are supposed to happen because of the makeup of the Senate.

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.

To know one's self is wisdom, but not to know one's neighbors is genius.

The genius which runs to madness is no longer genius.

Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.