Quotes about genius
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“It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women (1868), Ch. 22 : Artistic Attempts

Women, Men, People, Learning

“In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

“There is a fine line between insanity and genius.”

Dan Brown book The Lost Symbol

Source: The Lost Symbol

Funny

“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.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Truth, Victory, Sincerity

“Trust me. I'm a genius.”

Eoin Colfer Artemis Fowl

Source: Artemis Fowl

“YOU are a genius!… and I am a genius because I married you.”

Bill Cosby (1937) American actor, comedian, author, producer, musician, activist

“Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

“What's genius? I don't know but I do know that the difference between a madman and a professional is that a pro does as well as he can within what
he has set out to do and a madman does exceptionally well at what he can't help doing.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

Help

“Often-times it's madness, not genius that moves the world forward. Who else but the mad would reach so far, stretching for the impossible and, in so doing, prove the impossible possible!”

James Rollins Black Order

Source: Black Order

World, Time, Madness

“For a genius thief you really are a stupid girl aren't you?”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: Uncommon Criminals

Stupidity, Girl

“An average person who develops the habit of setting clear priorities and getting important tasks completed quickly will run circles around a genius who talks a lot and makes wonderful plans but gets very little done.”

Brian Tracy (1944) American motivational speaker and writer

Personality

“Talent does what it can: Genius does what it must.”

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) English novelist, poet, playwright, and politician

“Find out what people want to do, then tell them to do it. They'll think you're a genius.”

Connie Brockway (1954) American writer

Source: The Bridal Season

People, Thinking

“These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.”

Michael Cunningham book The Hours

Source: The Hours

People

“Valkyrie: “You are such a moron.”
Skulduggery: “Don't be jealous of my genius.”

Derek Landy Skulduggery Pleasant

Source: Skulduggery Pleasant

“The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.”

Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) Hungarian-British author and journalist

Perfection

“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

“Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

Disease

“She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

Sadness, Sad

“You’ve the presence of a mouse fart in a high wind. Stand aside, and try not to catch fire if I shed sparks of genius.”

Scott Lynch book The Republic of Thieves

Source: The Republic of Thieves

“gold is power-artemis fowl I liked the artemis fowl series because its about a boy genius”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Boy

“Stand aside, and try not to catch fire if I shed sparks of genius.”

Scott Lynch book The Republic of Thieves

Source: The Republic of Thieves

“Someone please tell me that we’re not seriously having a friggin’ debate over the genius of ‘Karma Chameleon’ at seven o’clock in the morning? (Xypher)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Dream Chaser

“Common sense is as rare as genius.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Sense

“Sleeping is the height of genius”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Sleep

“Foaly twitched his tail contentedly. Genius. No point in being humble about it.”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Arctic Incident

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863), III: “L’artiste, homme du monde, homme des foules et enfant”
Variant: Genius is nothing but youth recaptured.
Source: The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

Childhood

“A true genius admits that he/she knows nothing.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain.”

Margaret Atwood book The Robber Bride

Source: The Robber Bride

Pain

“Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.”

Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) Catholic bishop and television presenter

Jealousy

“I don't know yet what I am capable of doing, but, by God, I have genius -- I know it too well to blush behind it.”

Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) American writer

God

“With the proper training, I could've been an evil genius.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Evil, Training

“You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft—then you can add all the genius you like.”

Phyllis A. Whitney (1903–2008) American writer

Disappointment, Learning

“Excessive fear and self-doubt that were the greatest detractors of personal genius.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki book Rich Dad Poor Dad

Source: Rich Dad, Poor Dad

Fear, Personality

“I'm not a girl. I'm a genius.”

Joanna Russ book The Female Man

Source: The Female Man

Girl

“Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.”

Larry McMurtry (1936) American novelist, essayist, bookseller and screenwriter

Pain, Art

“Genius is fine for the ignition spark, but to get there someone has to see that the radiator doesn't leak and no tire is flat.”

Rex Stout book The Doorbell Rang

Source: The Doorbell Rang

“Baby," I said, "I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me."

She looked down at me. "Get up off the floor you damn fool and get me a drink.”

Charles Bukowski book Factotum

Source: Factotum

Fools, Drink, Baby

“I'm solitary as a pulled tooth,
Lonely as an unwelcome truth,
Lost as a minnow out of school,
A genius in a crop of fools.”

Gail Carson Levine Fairest

Source: Fairest

Truth, School, Fools

“Genius is a curse. That's how I look at it. Some think that the brilliant comprehend the universe in a way the rest of us can't. They see the world how it truly is—and that reality is so horrible the lose their minds. Clarity leads to insanity.”

Harlan Coben book Caught

Source: Caught

World, Way, Thinking, Reality

“Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.”

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American novelist, short story writer, designer

“Anyway, madness and genius. They're the disturbed pals of the human condition. The Bonnie and Clyde, the Thelma and Louise, the baking soda and vinegar. Insanity just walks alongside the brilliant like some creepy, insistent shadow.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: Wild Roses

Madness

“Education…is a companion which no misfortunes can depress, no clime destroy, no enemy alienate, no despotism enslave: at home a friend, abroad an introduction, in solitude a solace, in society an ornament: it chastens vice, it guides virtue, it gives at once a grace and government to genius. Without it, what is man? A splendid slave, a reasoning savage.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

Though sometimes attributed to Addison, this actually comes from a speech delivered by the Irish lawyer Charles Phillips in 1817, in the case of O'Mullan v. M'Korkill, published in Irish Eloquence: The Speeches of the Celebrated Irish Orators (1834) pp. 91-92.
Misattributed

Education, Home, Solitude

“True we can not see God, but we can see the genius of God by works for His hands. We can see by the order of creation that a Creator must exist; reason, logic and common sense point to that conclusion. It is the epitome of foolishness to say our world with its seasons, weather patterns, trees, flowers, birds etc…was the result of some explosion in space of which our earth was a part. How can we say that the human body “just happened” with no intelligent creator behind it? The motive for saying there is no God is deeper than just ignorance.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Cults, Sects and Questions (c. 1979)

God, World, Intelligence, Flowers

“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls & remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.”

Anthony Bourdain book A Cook's Tour

A Cook's Tour (2001)

Death, Dogs, Understanding, Reading

“If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 81

Art, Color, Mathematics, Study

“When I was hired they showed me my desk, an old beat-up scarred wooden desk, and they told me that it had been O. Henry’s desk when O. Henry worked for the paper, as he had at one time. And I readily believed it. I could see the place where O. Henry had savagely stabbed the desk with his pen in pursuit of a slimy adjective just out of reach, and a kind of bashed-in-looking place where O. Henry had beaten his poor genius head on the desk in frustration over not being able to capture the noun leaping like a fawn just out of reach… So I sat down at the desk and I too began to chase those devils, the dancy nouns and come-hither adjectives, what joy.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“Return”, p. 55.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

Time, Joy

“As the mental endowment of a man varies with the organisation of his accumulated experiences, the better endowed he is, the more readily will he be able to remember his whole past, everything that he has ever thought or heard, seen or done, perceived or felt, the more completely in fact will he be able to reproduce his whole life. Universal remembrance of all its experiences, therefore, is the surest, most general, and most easily proved mark of a genius.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Source: Sex and Character (1903), pp. 114-115.

Life, Universe, Past

“Wesley was a great Englishman, first and last…if any one single man stood between England and the monstrous upheavals on the Continent, it was John Wesley…He was typically English: the best native qualities of the Englishman were in him, and were raised to such an extraordinary pitch that they became genius…Historians of that century who filled their pages with Napoleon and had nothing to say of John Wesley now realise that they cannot explain the nineteenth-century England until they can explain Wesley. And I believe it is true to say that you cannot understand twentieth-century America unless you can understand Wesley.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the 150th anniversary meeting of Wesley's Chapel, London (1 November 1928), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 94-98.
1928

Understanding

“Franklin is a good type of our American manhood. Although not the wealthiest or the most powerful, he is undoubtedly, in the versatility of his genius and achievements, the greatest of our self-made men. The simple yet graphic story in the Autobiography of his steady rise from humble boyhood in a tallow-chandler shop, by industry, economy, and perseverance in self-improvement, to eminence, is the most remarkable of all the remarkable histories of our self-made men. It is in itself a wonderful illustration of the results possible to be attained in a land of unequaled opportunity by following Franklin's maxims.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Written by Frank Woodworth Pine in his introduction to the 1916 publication of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20203/20203-h/20203-h.htm. Pine, F.W. (editor). Henry Holt and Company via Gutenberg Press. (1916). Introduction. The Autobiography (1818), The Autobiography (1916)

Men, History, Perseverance

“The appearance of a single great genius is more than equivalent to the birth of a hundred mediocrities.”

Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) Italian criminologist

Pt. II, ch. 2.
The Man of Genius (1891)

Birth, Appearance

“That master of arts, that dispenser of genius, the Belly.”
Magister artis ingenique largitor venter.

Persius (34–62) ancient latin poet

Prologue, line 10.
The Satires

Art

“I must confess that my estimate of Lovecraft would not have pleased his most ardent admirers. The view I expressed in that book was that, while Lovecraft was distinctly a creative genius in his own way, his pessimism should not be taken too seriously; that it was the pessimism of a sick recluse, and had about it an element of rassentiment, a kind of desire to take revenge on the world that rejected him. In short, Lovecraft was a 19th century romantic, born in the wrong time. Most men of genius dislike their own age, but the really great ones impose their own vision on the age. The weak ones turn away into a world of gloomy fantasy.”

Colin Wilson book The Mind Parasites

Source: The Mind Parasites (1967), p. 2

Men, Books, Age, World

“You're contending with a genius, D. J. is his name, only American alive who could outtalk Cassius Clay, that's lip.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

D.J., in Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) Ch. 1

“One is tempted to call them works of genius; they are quite Homeric in their internal unity, purity of phrasing, clear, ringing music of language and dramatic coloring.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

Lin Carter, Dragons, Elves, and Heroes (New York: Ballantine, 1971) p. 76.
Criticism

Music, Color

“I have a bit of a consummate victim in my head. That’s who I identify with throughout history. When I was 10 I would draw black eyes on myself because I thought it was cool. You’re so into people who are tragic. You want to be that so badly. But you probably aren’t really the tragic genius that you think you are.”

Peter Wentz (1979) American musician

"This Charming Man," interview, Out.com (August 2008)

People, History, Thinking, Drawing

“For those who labor, I propose to improve unemployment insurance, to expand minimum wage benefits, and by the repeal of section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act to make the labor laws in all our states equal to the laws of the 31 states which do not have tonight right-to-work measures. And I also intend to ask the Congress to consider measures which, without improperly invading state and local authority, will enable us effectively to deal with strikes which threaten irreparable damage to the national interest. The third path is the path of liberation. It is to use our success for the fulfillment of our lives. A great nation is one which breeds a great people. A great people flower not from wealth and power, but from a society which spurs them to the fullness of their genius. That alone is a Great Society. Yet, slowly, painfully, on the edge of victory, has come the knowledge that shared prosperity is not enough. In the midst of abundance modern man walks oppressed by forces which menace and confine the quality of his life, and which individual abundance alone will not overcome. We can subdue and we can master these forces—bring increased meaning to our lives—if all of us, government and citizens, are bold enough to change old ways, daring enough to assault new dangers, and if the dream is dear enough to call forth the limitless capacities of this great people.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Life, People, Law, Dreams

“Nations are represented by their poets and their writers in the open competition for the Nobel Prize. Consequently the award of the Prize by the Academy glorifies not only the author but the people whose son he is, and it bears witness that that nation has a share in the universal achievement, that its efforts are fruitful, and that it has the right to live for the profit of mankind. If this honour is premous to all, it is infinitely more so to Poland. It has been said that Poland is dead, exhausted, enslaved, but here is the proof of her life and triumph. Like Galileo, one is forced to think when before the eyes of the world homage has been rendered to the importance of Poland's achievement and her genius.”

Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) Polish journalist, Nobel Prize-winning novelist, and philanthropist

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1905)

Life, People, World, Thinking

“My aunt is convinced I have a "flair for research." This is not true. If I had a flair for research, I would be doing research. Actually I'm not very smart. My grades were average. My mother and my aunt think I am smart because I am quiet and absent-minded–and because my father and grandfather were smart. They think I was meant to do research because I am not fit to do anything else–I am a genius whom ordinary professions can't satisfy.”

Walker Percy book The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer (1961)

Thinking

“And that is what the Constitution is all about -- providing freedom from abuse by those in authority. Anyone who says the American Constitution is obsolete just because social and economic conditions have changed does not understand the real genius of the Constitution. It was designed to control something which has not changed and will not change - namely, human nature.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The 5,000 Year Leap (1981)

Understanding, Nature, Freedom, Change

“From haunted spring and dale
Edged with poplar pale
The parting genius is with sighing sent.”

John Milton On the Morning of Christ's Nativity

Hymn, stanza 20, line 184
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (1629)

Spring, Parting

“If the genius is an artist, then he accomplishes his work as art, but neither he nor his work of art has a telos outside him.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, Two Ethical-Religious Minor Essays (1849), P. 108

Art

“By a pardonable abridgment of history, the Rationalist character may be seen springing from the exaggeration of Bacon's hopes and the neglect of the scepticism of Descartes; modern Rationalism is what commonplace minds made out of the inspiration of men of discrimination and genius.”

Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) British philosopher

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

Men, Hope, History, Spring

“I have no reason to suppose that Lenin gained his ideas from my books; but if that were true, I should be not a little proud of having contribute to the intellectual development of a man who seems to me to be at once the greatest theoretician of socialism since Marx and a statesman whose genius recalls that of Peter the Great.”

Georges Sorel (1847–1922) French philosopher and sociologist

“For Lenin,” Soviet Russia, Official Organ of The Russian Soviet Government Bureau, Vol. II, New York: NY, January-June 1920 (April 10, 1920), p. 356

Books, Idea

“In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine.”

Ted Sizer (1932–2009) American education reformer

Source: Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School (1984), p. 95.

Education, School, History, Learning

“Whether we believe the Greek poet, "it is sometimes even pleasant to be mad", or Plato, "he who is master of himself has knocked in vain at the doors of poetry"; or Aristotle, "no great genius was without a mixture of insanity"; the mind cannot express anything lofty and above the ordinary unless inspired. When it despises the common and the customary, and with sacred inspiration rises higher, then at length it sings something grander than that which can come from mortal lips. It cannot attain anything sublime and lofty so long as it is sane: it must depart from the customary, swing itself aloft, take the bit in its teeth, carry away its rider and bear him to a height whither he would have feared to ascend alone.”

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

In Latin, nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit (There is no great genius without some touch of madness). This passage by Seneca is the source most often cited in crediting Aristotle with this thought, but in Problemata xxx. 1, Aristotle says: 'Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholic?' The quote by Plato is from the Dialogue Phaedrus (245a).
On Tranquility of the Mind

Fear, Singing, Madness

“Even Voltaire's father could not make a lawyer out of a genius. To be a good lawyer, one must have a mind and a disposition to venerate the past; a respect for precedents; a belief in the wisdom and the sanctity of the dead. Voltaire had genius, imagination, feeling, and poetry, and these gifts always have been, and always will be, incompatible with the practice of law.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Voltaire (1916)

Wisdom, Law, Feeling, Imagination

“Right honest studies my career can show
with long experience blent as best beseems,
and genius here presented for thy view;—
gifts, that conjoined appertain to few.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Nem me falta na vida honesto estudo,
Com longa experiência misturado,
Nem engenho, que aqui vereis presente,
Cousas que juntas se acham raramente.
Stanza 154, lines 5–8 (tr. Richard Francis Burton)
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto X

Study

“We take pleasure in watching an athlete break a record, hearing a soprano in full flight, or reading a philosopher of depth and insight. Human accomplishment is the ultimate spectator sport. Apply as much historical analysis to it as we wish, and we’ll not unlock all its mysteries. The continuous capacity of genius to surpass understanding remains a human constant.”

Denis Dutton (1944–2010) Professor and philosopher

" Of Human Accomplishment http://denisdutton.com/murray_review.htm", The New Criterion (February 2004)

Pleasure, Understanding, Sport, Reading

“I don't care about that scum! Why should I receive a prize? I know that I'm a genius!”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

As quoted by Werner Herzog, in My Best Fiend, (1999)

“Now if plurality and difference belong only to the appearance-form; if there is but one and the same Entity manifested in all living things: it follows that, when we obliterate the distinction between the ego and the non-ego, we are not the sport of an illusion. Rather are we so, when we maintain the reality of individuation, — a thing the Hindus call Maya, that is, a deceptive vision, a phantasma. The former theory we have found to be the actual source of the phaenomenon of Compassion; indeed Compassion is nothing but its translation into definite expression. This, therefore, is what I should regard as the metaphysical foundation of Ethics, and should describe it as the sense which identifies the ego with the non-ego, so that the individual directly recognises in another his own self, his true and very being. From this standpoint the profoundest teaching of theory pushed to its furthest limits may be shown in the end to harmonise perfectly with the rules of justice and loving-kindness, as exercised; and conversely, it will be clear that practical philosophers, that is, the upright, the beneficent, the magnanimous, do but declare through their acts the same truth as the man of speculation wins by laborious research … He who is morally noble, however deficient in mental penetration, reveals by his conduct the deepest insight, the truest wisdom; and puts to shame the most accomplished and learned genius, if the latter's acts betray that his heart is yet a stranger to this great principle, — the metaphysical unity of life.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book On the Basis of Morality

Part IV, Ch. 2, pp. 273 https://archive.org/stream/basisofmorality00schoiala#page/273/mode/2up-274 On the Basis of Morality (1840)

Love, Life, Wisdom, Truth

“Genius is fostered by energy.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Suggested to be from Pro Caelio (ch. xix, sec. 45: "...in that branch of study you saw not only his genius shine forth, which frequently, even when it is not nourished by industry, still produces great effects by its own natural vigour...")
Disputed

“He wasn't just a genius, he had the genius's impatience with the whole idea of doing something again. He reinvented an art form, exhausted its possibilities, and just left it. There is always something frightening about that degree of inventiveness… He didn't lose his powers. He just lost interest in proving that he possessed them.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Vale, Peter Cook' ( The Pembroke College, Cambridge, Society Annuel Gazette http://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/odds+ends/petercook.html, September 1995) Essays and reviews

Art, Idea

“Most, if not all, of the great ideas of modern mathematics have had their origin in observation. Take, for instance, the arithmetical theory of forms, of which the foundation was laid in the diophantine theorems of Fermat, left without proof by their author, which resisted all efforts of the myriad-minded Euler to reduce to demonstration, and only yielded up their cause of being when turned over in the blow-pipe flame of Gauss’s transcendent genius; or the doctrine of double periodicity, which resulted from the observation of Jacobi of a purely analytical fact of transformation; or Legendre’s law of reciprocity; or Sturm’s theorem about the roots of equations, which, as he informed me with his own lips, stared him in the face in the midst of some mechanical investigations connected (if my memory serves me right) with the motion of compound pendulums; or Huyghen’s method of continued fractions, characterized by Lagrange as one of the principal discoveries of that great mathematician, and to which he appears to have been led by the construction of his Planetary Automaton; or the new algebra, speaking of which one of my predecessors (Mr. Spottiswoode) has said, not without just reason and authority, from this chair, “that it reaches out and indissolubly connects itself each year with fresh branches of mathematics, that the theory of equations has become almost new through it, algebraic 31 geometry transfigured in its light, that the calculus of variations, molecular physics, and mechanics” (he might, if speaking at the present moment, go on to add the theory of elasticity and the development of the integral calculus) “have all felt its influence.”

James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897) English mathematician

James Joseph Sylvester. "A Plea for the Mathematician, Nature," Vol. 1, p. 238; Collected Mathematical Papers, Vol. 2 (1908), pp. 655, 656.

Law, Mathematics, Idea, Effort

“Now I know it’s unfashionable to refer to colonialism in anything other than negative terms. And certainly, no part of the world is unscarred by the excesses of empires. But in the Canadian context, the actions of the British Empire were largely benign and occasionally brilliant…This genius for governance shown by the mother country at the time no doubt explains in part why Canada’s path to independence was so long, patient and peaceful.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

Address to the Canada-UK Chamber of Commerce July 14, 2006 http://pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?category=2&id=1247 : On Canada
2006

World, Peace, Time, Parting

“The goal of deriving all the phenomena of nature from a few basic physical laws and the axioms of mathematics had been set by Galileo…
In studying curvilinear motions on the earth Galileo had found the parabola to be the basic curve. In the heavens… Kepler… had found the ellipse to be the basic curve. Why this difference? …since parabola and ellipse are both conic sections there was the provocative suggestion that perhaps some physical law unified these related paths of motion. …
It has often happened in the history of mathematics and science that major problems remained outstanding… great minds… succeeded only in revealing the true difficulties… and in generating an atmosphere of dispair… Then a genius appeared… with ideas that seemed remarkably simple once propounded, clarified the entire situation, dispelled the confusion, restored order, and produced a new synthesis that embraced far more even than the phenomena under consideration. The genius who… picked up the torch of science dropped by Galileo, was Isaac Newton.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics and the Physical World (1959), p. 225

Law, History, Mathematics, Idea

“I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

The Passion (1987)

Love, Feeling, Light, Reading

“Syd was a genius. But I wouldn't want to go back to playing Interstellar Overdrive for hours and hours.”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

Q Magazine, November 1992
Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett

“I realized that the image I had been given by my teachers, the scientists.... by their way of looking at Nature, was just another stage setting with all the magnificence and ingenuity that the genius of any artist produces in a work of art. I realized that in my scientific journey I had been under the power of a magic spell of a work of art whose reality was just as true as the verity of the image in an artist's vision.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

Quote from Of divers arts, (1962), p. 21; as cited in International Handbook on Giftedness, Larisa V. Shavinina (2009), p. 862
undated

Art, Way, Nature, Reality

“This evil fortune, which generally attends extraordinary men in the management of great affairs, has been imputed to divers causes, that need not be here set down, when so obvious a one occurs, if what a certain writer observes be true, that when a great genius appears in the world the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Essay on the Fates of Clergymen (1728)

Men, World, Appearance, Evil

“True Genius, like Armida’s wand,
Can raise the spring from barren land.
While all the art of Imitation,
Is pilf’ring from the first creation.”

Robert Lloyd (poet) (1733–1764) English poet and satirist

‘Shakespeare’ (1762)

Art, Spring

“Every man is a potential genius until he does something.”

Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852–1917) English actor and theatre manager

Page 110.
Beerbohm Tree (1956)

““Genius such as yours is a genetic gift.”
“So I have heard from my parents.””

Norman Spinrad book The Void Captain's Tale

Source: The Void Captain's Tale (1983), Chapter 7 (p. 83)

Parent

“On 11 October 1908, having worked for six years at my international magazine Poesia, in an attempt to free the Italian lyrical genius that was under sentence of death from its traditional and commercial fetters, I suddenly felt that articles, poetry and controversies were no longer enough. It was absolutely crucial to switch methods, get out into the streets, lay siege to theaters, and introduce the fisticuffs into the artistic struggle... My Italian blood raced faster when my lips coined out loud the word FUTURISM.
It was the new formula of Action-Art and a code of mental health. It was a youthful and innovative banner, anti-traditional, optimistic, heroic and dynamic, that had to be hoisted over the ruins of all attachment to the past.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

quote from 'Guerra sola igiene del mundo', in Edizione Futuriste di Poesia', Milan 1915; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 21
1910's

Death, Health, Youth, Art

“They [the true instructors of the people] will accustom children to the vegetable régime. The peoples living on vegetable foods, are, of all men, the handsomest, the most vigorous, the least exposed to diseases and to passions, and they whose lives last longest. Such, in Europe, are a large proportion of the Swiss. The greater part of the peasantry who, in every country, form the most vigorous portion of the people, eat very little flesh-meat. The Russians have multiplied periods of fasting and days of abstinence, from which even the soldiers are not exempt; and yet they resist all kinds of fatigues. The negroes, who undergo so many hard blows in our colonies, live upon manioc, potatoes, and maize alone. The Brahmins of India, who frequently reach the age of one hundred years, eat only vegetable foods. It was from the Pythagorean sect that issued Epaminondas, so celebrated by for his virtues, Archytas, by his genius for mathematics and mechanics; Milo of Crotona, by his strength of body. Pythagoras himself was the finest man of his time, and, without dispute, the most enlightened, since he was the father of philosophy amongst the Greeks. Inasmuch as the non-flesh diet introduces with many virtues and excludes none, it will be well to bring up the young upon it, since it has so happy an influence upon the beauty of the body and upon the tranquillity of the mind. This regimen prolongs childhood, and, by consequence, human life.”

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814) writer and botanist from France

Vœux d'un solitaire, pour servir de suite aux "Études de la nature", as quoted in The Ethics of Diet by Howard Williams (University of Illinois Press, 2003, p. 175 https://books.google.it/books?id=o9ugCcZ13BMC&pg=PA175)

Life, Men, Happiness, Children

“The qualities called personal… and the ability to impart them, in greater or less degree, is the gage of genius in art.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

Art, Personality

“I have to come to think myself in the last lap of life that one should always look back upon the history of the past, study it and meditate upon it. Thus one learns the main line of advance…it is wrong to be bound by the events and commitments of the last few years, unless these are sound and compatible with the main historic line. I am sure the right course is to know as much as possible about all that has happened in the world, and then to act entirely upon the merits from day to day. Of course, my ideal is narrow and limited. I want to see the British Empire preserved for a few more generations in its strength and splendour. Only the most prodigious exertions of British genius will achieve this result.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Lord Linlithgow (3 November 1937), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 886
The 1930s

Life, World, History, Thinking

“The oft-heard comment that Leonardo [da Vinci]'s genius managed to transcend the culture of his time is amply justified. But his was not a science-fiction voyage into the future as much as a plunge into the past.”

Lucio Russo (1944) Italian historian and scientist

11.2, "The Renaissance", p. 336
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

Science, Time, Past, Future

“Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labour in it, but they labour in it because they excel.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

No. 416
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)

Men

“Statues to whose rest seem'd given
Not the life of earth but heaven;
For each statue here enshrined
What in the immortal mind
Makes its beauty and its power —
Genius's eternal dower :”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(25th June 1831) The Hall of Statues
The London Literary Gazette, 1831

Life, Beauty

“I was honoured to be on our next performer’s new video. And if I ever record an album, I want this guy to produce it and make me beautiful duets, ‘cause he’s a freakin’ genius!”

Anna Nicole Smith (1967–2007) American model, actress, and television personality

Anna Nicole Smith (2004) cited in: Cyril H. Wecht, Dawna Kaufmann (2009) A question of murder: compelling cases from a famed forensic pathologist. p. 99
With this statement Smith introduced Kanye West at the 2004 American Music Awards, November 14, 2004

Beauty, Guy

“Nor mourn the unalterable Days
That Genius goes and Folly stays.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

In Memoriam E.B.E. http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=l&p=c&a=p&ID=20607&c=323, st. 9 Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“The next day he [uncle Alfred] took me to hear the 'Concert Colonne' at the Chatelet. First we lunched and then went to the hall. There was a fine program! Schumann, Bizet (new to me), Berlioz (ditto). - I can scarcely express how I marveled at the Hamlet and Romeo et Juliette of Berlioz. - He belongs with Delacroix, with Shakespeare, he is of the same family, he has the mark of these men of genius. He is prodigious in movement, imagination, strangeness, vigor, delicacy, sense of contrast, he is terrible and suave.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Camille Pissarro, Paris, 2 April 1883, in a letter to his son Lucien; from Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 26
1880's

Men, Family, Imagination, Sense

“The great genius does not let his work be determined by the concrete finite conditions that surround him, whilst it is from these that the work of the statesman takes its direction and its termination. … It is the genius in reality and not the other who is the creator of history, for it is only the genius who is outside and unconditioned by history.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 139.

History, Reality

“He seemed to feel something like indulgent contempt for the rest of the world. It was all right, I suppose. Nobody had better reason. The man was a genius.”

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author

Source: The Time Axis (1949), Ch. 2 : The Stain and the Stone

World, Feeling

“Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate.”

Horace Mann (1796–1859) American politician

As quoted in Many Thoughts of Many Minds : A Treasury Of Quotations From The Literature Of Every Land And Every Age (1896) edited by Louis Klopsch

“An artist, if good for anything, foresees what his public will see; and what his public will see is what he ought to have intended — the measure of his genius. If the public sees more than he himself did, this is his credit; if less, this is his fault. No matter how simple or ignorant we are, we ought to feel a discord or a harmony where the artist meant us to feel it, and when we see a motive, we conclude that other people have seen it before us, and that it must therefore have been intended.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

People, Feeling, Motivation

“Can the philosopher, big with the inspiration of an idea that is to reform mankind, believe that he is to be beckoned from this sensible existence at the very instant when he is mustering his breath to speak the word of light? Should he perish so, the weary ages must pass away—the world's, whose life sand may fall, drop by drop—before another intellect is prepared to develop the truth that might have been uttered then. But history affords many an example where the most precious spirit… has gone hence… The prophet dies, and the man of torpid heart and sluggish brain lives on. The poet leaves his song half sung, or finishes it, beyond the scope of mortal ears… The painter—as Allston did—leaves half his conception on the canvas to sadden us with its imperfect beauty, and goes to picture forth the whole… in the hues of heaven. But rather such incomplete designs of life will be perfected nowhere. This so frequent abortion of man's dearest projects must be taken as proof that the deeds of earth, however etherealized by piety or genius, are without value, except as exercises and manifestations of the spirit.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

"The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844)

Life, Truth, Age, World

“And, notwithstanding a few exceptions, we do undoubtedly find that the most truly eminent men have had not only their affections, but also their intellect, greatly influenced by women. I will go even farther; and I will venture to say that those who have not undergone that influence betray a something incomplete and mutilated. We detect, even in their genius, a certain frigidity of tone; and we look in vain for that burning fire, that gushing and spontaneous nature with which our ideas of genius are indissolubly associated. Therefore, it is, that those who are most anxious that the boundaries of knowledge should be enlarged, ought to be most eager that the influence of women should be increased, in order that every resource of the human mind may be at once and quickly brought into play.”

Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862) English historian

" The Influence Of Women On The Progress Of Knowledge http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/soj/u-rel/buckle.html". Lecture given at the Royal Institution 19 March 1858. In: The Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of Henry Thomas Buckle (1872)

Women, Men, Idea, Nature

“My father rarely spoke of life before [he left Cuba]. About prison, he jsut said, "That man is a genius at PR." Castro would come to the jail in the middle of the night and ask the prisoners, "What are you doing here? Don't you see we're trying to do the right thing?" The reason I'm not more political is because I have music. And from a young age, I needed it. After prison, my father came to America, joined the Army, fought in Vietnam -- and was exposed to Agent Orange. He died a slow, horrible death. Music was my escape.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

www.huffingtonpost.com (September 7, 2007)
2007, 2008

Life, Death, Age, Music

Quotes about genius page 4

Quotes about genius
page 4