Genius Quotes

Yes, failure is part of the mix, he says, but it is a means, not an end. If you fail repeatedly, and in the same manner, you're an idiot, not a genius.

~ Eric Weiner

We don't punish the ones who fail. They just-don't go on

~ Orson Scott Card

He challenged the world with his genius, and the world defeated him by ignoring the challenge and starving him. He stopped writing because he had failed and because he had no choice but to accept the world’s terms: there is no mystery here. This was not insanity, but common sense.

~ Raymond Weaver

Trust that you have everything you need right now to be successful financially. All it takes to bring out your natural, God-given gifts is your desire, determination, and a deep faith that you have a genius and a gift that is unique.

~ Robert T. Kiyosaki

Mum, mum,He that keeps nor crust nor crumb,Weary of all, shall want some.

~ William Shakespeare

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

~ Connie Brockway

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!

~ Gian-Carlo Rota

The only choice once your world has been torn apart is to find your genius and live with that. ‘Normal’ is out of the question. The healing for veterans, or anyone going through great tragedy, is finding your natural spirit and your genius that was waiting to be found. That can now become the cohering principle in your life. The idea of patching someone up and back into normal when they’ve had extremely abnormal experiences is a misunderstanding.

~ Michael Meade

Color me....BRILLIANT.

~ Coco J. Ginger

Sometimes she arches away from me and wears a light halo of genius about her.

~ Priya Parmar

...bow to genius, but to the authority of that genius - not the display of talent...

~ John Geddes

Genius is a sovereign power; it forms schools; it lays hold on the spirits of men, with irresistible might; and it exercises an immeasurable influence on the whole condition of human life. This sovereignty of genius is a gift of God, possessed only by his grace. It is subject to no one and is responsible to him alone who has granted it this ascendancy.

~ Abraham Kuyper

A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.

~ Max Gluckman

I think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books

~ China Miéville

I love writing and can't imagine not being able to do it. I want an easy life and if it had been difficult doing it I wouldn't be doing it. I do admire writers who do it even though it costs them.

~ Iain M. Banks

It would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it.

~ Pat Conroy

It is good to recall that three centuries ago, around the year 1660, two of the greatest monuments of modern history were erected, one in the West and one in the East; St. Paul's Cathedral in London and the Taj Mahal in Agra. Between them, the two symbolize, perhaps better than words can describe, the comparative level of architectural technology, the comparative level of craftsmanship and the comparative level of affluence and sophistication the two cultures had attained at that epoch of history. But about the same time there was also created—and this time only in the West—a third monument, a monument still greater in its eventual import for humanity. This was Newton's Principia, published in 1687. Newton's work had no counterpart in the India of the Mughals.

~ Abdus Salam

Sure I eat my feelings, but I save the emotional roller coaster for dessert

~ Josh Stern

For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.

~ Orson Scott Card

Girls did that then – knocked themselves out to support some man’s notion of his own genius. What was Gavin doing to help pay the rent? Not much, though she suspected him of dealing pot on the side. Once in a while they even smoked some of that, though not often, because it made Constance cough. It was all very romantic.

~ Margaret Atwood

As a child i was nothing short of a genius, as a man i got used to stupidity.

~ Paul Bamikole

Genius and science have burst the limits of space, and few observations, explained by just reasoning, have unveiled the mechanism of the universe. Would it not also be glorious for man to burst the limits of time, and, by a few observations, to ascertain the history of this world, and the series of events which preceded the birth of the human race?

~ Georges Cuvier

To eliminate the discrepancy between men's plans and the results achieved, a new approach is necessary. Morphological thinking suggests that this new approach cannot be realized through increased teaching of specialized knowledge. This morphological analysis suggests that the essential fact has been overlooked that every human is potentially a genius. Education and dissemination of knowledge must assume a form which allows each student to absorb whatever develops his own genius, lest he become frustrated. The same outlook applies to the genius of the peoples as a whole.

~ Fritz Zwicky

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him...

~ Orson Scott Card

Through our scientific and technological genius we've made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers—or we will all perish together as fools.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

~ Novalis

The most mesmerizing of artists is always like one who was merely drawing in the sand and people came to watch.

~ Criss Jami

And here we go creating great men out of artisans who happened to have stumbled on a way to improve electrical apparatus or pedal through Sweden on a bicycle! And we solicit great men to write books promoting the cult of other great men! It's really very funny, and worth the price of admission! It will all end up with every village having his own great man - a lawyer, a novelist, and a polar explorer of immense stature! And the world will become wonderfully flat and simple and easy to master . . .

~ Knut Hamsun

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered — either by themselves or by others. But for the Civil War, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan would not have been discovered, nor have risen into notice.

~ Mark Twain

No, I don't admire the genius. But I admire and love the result of the genius's activity in the world, of which the great man is only the poor necessary tool, only, so to speak, the paltry awl to bore with.

~ Knut Hamsun

There was never a great genius without a touch of madness.

~ Ben Jonson

Even if there are instances in which it can be mistook by onlookers, never fool yourself into using misunderstood genius as an excuse to be a fool.

~ Criss Jami

My heart goes out to some of those rather hostile yet highly intelligent individuals who may see problems really because they have solutions. That hostility is learned in defense; not offense. An often stubborn and prideful world, in its self-destructive, temporary bliss of ignorance, may be violently resistant to the watchful mind.

~ Criss Jami

The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.

~ Abigail Adams

There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and household virtues; there are many that can discern Genius on his starry track, though the mob is incapable; but when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself, that it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world, sooner than soil its white hands by any compliances, comes into our streets and houses, --only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it, is to own it.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I cannot live to hear the news from England.But I do prophesy th' election lightsOn Fortinbras; he has my dying voice.So tell him, with th' occurents, more and less,Which have solicited - the rest is silence.

~ William Shakespeare

When your efforts run in the face of conventional wisdom and accepted mastery, persistence can look like madness. If you succeed in the end, this extreme originality reformulates into a new level of mastery, sometimes even genius; if you fail in the end, you remain a madman in the eyes of others, and maybe even yourself. When you are in the midst of the journey…there’s really no way of knowing which one you are.” (p.129)

~ Hilary Austen

Explore your inner creative genius through the medium you love and enjoy the journey!

~ Ken Poirot

Happenstance is the myth of the simple mind, for it is the deliberate genius of God that what appears entirely disjointed always reveals itself to be stunningly seamless. And it is in reflecting on such stunning ingenuity that our faith becomes seamless.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough