125 quotes about Genius



A genius is one who can do anything except make a living.
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Genius is sorrow's child.
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It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women.
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Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
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To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.
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We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.
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There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.
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There are big men, men of intellect, intellectual men, men of talent and men of action; but the great man is difficult to find, and it needs --apart from discernment --a certain greatness to find him.
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Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
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Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.
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Genius is childhood recaptured.
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One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.
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Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.
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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.
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Genius is the gold in the mine; talent is the miner who works and brings it out.
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Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.
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What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?
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Since when was genius found respectable?
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Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.
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Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius.
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A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.
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I really cannot know whether I am or am not the Genius you are pleased to call me, but I am very willing to put up with the mistake, if it be one. It is a title dearly enough bought by most men, to render it endurable, even when not quite clearly made out, which it never can be till the Posterity, whose decisions are merely dreams to ourselves, has sanctioned or denied it, while it can touch us no further.
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What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
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Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
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Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.
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Passion holds up the bottom of the universe and genius paints up its roof.
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The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.
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Genius is independent of situation.
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True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.
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As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius -- the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.
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The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.
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When human power becomes so great and original that we can account for it only as a kind of divine imagination, we call it genius.
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Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.
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Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
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Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.
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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.
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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.
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Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.
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Genius, when young, is divine.
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Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius.
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Genius must be born, and never can be taught.
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Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.
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Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought, but genius must be born; and never can be taught.
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His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.
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Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
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Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.
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Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.
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The greatest genius is the most indebted person.
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The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.
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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.
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When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
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In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
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Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.
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Accept your genius and say what you think.
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A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
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Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders.
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Genius is entitled to respect only when it promotes the peace and improves the happiness of mankind.
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Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
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Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What's a sundial in the shade.
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I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.
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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.
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Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.
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The first and last thing required of genius is, love of the truth.
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The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources.
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Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have is this. When I have a subject in mind. I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it... the effort which I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.
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Nothing is so envied as genius, nothing so hopeless of attainment by labor alone. Though labor always accompanies the greatest genius, without the intellectual gift labor alone will do little.
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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.
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Talent is a faculty that is highly developed, but genius commands all the faculties.
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Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.
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Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature.
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The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
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Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass spoil a draught of fair water.
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Genius is the ability to act rightly without precedent -- the power to do the right thing the first time.
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Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
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The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds.
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We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
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Rising genius always shoots out its rays from among the clouds, but these will gradually roll away and disappear as it ascends to its steady luster.
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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitual way.
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Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police.
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Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.
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Genius sits in a glass house -- but in an unbreakable one --conceiving ideas. After giving birth, it falls into madness. Stretches out its hand through the window toward the first person happening by. The demon's claw rips, the iron fist grips. Before, you were a model, mocks the ironic voice between serrated teeth, for me, you are raw material to work on. I throw you against the glass wall, so that you remain stuck there, projected and stuck. (Then come the lovers of art and contemplate the bleeding work from outside. Then come the photographers. New art, it says in the newspaper the following day. The learned journals give it a name that ends in ism.)
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All of us, you, your children, your neighbors and their children are everyday geniuses, eve