“The moment of recognizing your own lack of talent is a flash of genius.”
Stanisław Jerzy Lec book Unkempt Thoughts
Unkempt Thoughts (1957), p. 116
Source: The Valley of Fear
“The moment of recognizing your own lack of talent is a flash of genius.”
Stanisław Jerzy Lec book Unkempt Thoughts
Unkempt Thoughts (1957), p. 116
“Genius declares itself to be a kind of higher masculinity.”
Otto Weininger book Sex and Character
Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 111.
“You can do something with talent, but nothing with genius….”
Margot Asquith (1864–1945) Anglo-Scottish socialite, author and wit
Quoted in Jack Fishman's My Darling Clementine, the biography of Winston Churchill's wife. (p. 131).
Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)
Quote from a program at a Coolidge memorial service (1933); cited in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1999). The passage did not originate with Coolidge, but evolved over several decades, appearing as early as 1881 in a youth guidance book. From [Garson O’Toole, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/01/12/persist/, Purpose and Persistence Are Required for Success: Unrewarded Genius Is Almost a Proverb, Quote Investigator, January 12, 2016]
1930s
Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
“In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.”
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer
“Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities”
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
“Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.”
Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) Catholic bishop and television presenter
“Mediocrity can talk; but it is for genius to observe.”
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister
Isaac D'Israeli, The Curiosities of Literature, "Men of Genius Deficient in Conversation".
Misattributed, Isaac D'Israeli