Genius Quotes

The only guaranteed way to be a genius is to surround yourself with idiots.

~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

A genius is a grownup that remained a kid.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I mean, Tarantino is such a SHMUCK 90 percent of the time. But ten percent of the time, I've seen genius shining off the guy.

~ David Foster Wallace

Almost all genius up to now was one-sided—the result of a sickly constitution. One type had too much sense of the external, the other too much inner sense. Seldom could nature achieve a balance between the two—a complete constitution of genius. Often a perfect proportion arose by chance, but this could never endure because it was not comprehended and fixed by the spirit—they remained fortunate moments. The first genius that penetrated itself found here the exemplary germ of an immeasurable world. It made a discovery which must have been the most remarkable in the history of the world—for with it there begins a whole new epoch for humanity—and true history of all kinds becomes possible for the first time at this stage—for the way that had been traversed hitherto now makes up a proper whole that can be entirely elucidated. That point outside the world is given, and now Archimedes can fulfill his promise.

~ Novalis

If people fully understand you, they will think of you as a normal, if they half understand you, will think of you as a genius, and when they can't understand, will certainly think of you a stupid.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind.

~ Andrea Dworkin

If it weren't for acid, you might not have an IPod, and you definitely would not have some of the best music in your IPod.

~ Bill Maher

Mediocrity is always in a rush, but whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing with consideration. For genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone can do badly.

~ Amelia E. Barr

Intelligence and common sense, what makes a person a real genius.

~ Wazim Shaw

Philosophy is to the mind of the architect as eyesight to his steps. The Term 'genius' when applied to him simply means a man who understands what others only know about. A poet, artist or architect, necessarily 'understands' in this sense and is likely, if not careful, to have the term 'genius' applied to him; in which case he will no longer be thought human, trustworthy or companionable. Whatever may be his medium of expression he utters truth with manifest beauty of thought. If he is an architect, his building is natural. In him, philosophy and genius live by each other, but the combination is subject to popular suspicion and appellation 'genius' likely to settle him--so far as the public is concerned.

~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midwife to genius, but if I have not facilitated,I have at least not, as many women might have done, prevented. This is a very small virtue to claim, a very negative achievement to hang my whole life on.

~ A.s. Byatt

It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12,13,14, and 15) which over fifty years, created and expanded the the audience of listeners to the quartets of Beethoven, thus achieving, as all masterpieces do, progress if not in the quality of artists, at least in the company of minds, which is largely composed these days of what was missing when the work appeared: people capable of liking it.

~ Marcel Proust

Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day.

~ Samuel Goldwyn

What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. 'Librarian' - that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between 'libido' and 'licentious' - it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books. - p.113

~ Miles Harvey

Genius is always accompanied by enthusiasm.

~ Bryant Mcgill

There is no gap as wide as the one between mediocrity and genius.

~ Rutvik Oza

Geniuses are those who have the intelligence, enthusiasm, and endurance to acquire the needed expertise in a broadly valued domain of achievement and who then make contributions to that field that are considered by peers to be both original and highly exemplary.

~ Dean Keith Simonton

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

~ Terry Pratchett

I went to some classes. Vampire was in the Hair of Magical Magic Creatures. He looked all depressed because Draco had disappeared and he had used to be in love with Draco. He was sucking some blood from a Hufflepuff.

~ Tara Gilesbie

A man's genius seems to befriend the more when he reads with open heart, the masterpiece of masterminds, the sagacity of sages, and the ingenious words of geniuses of ages.

~ Ogwo David Emenike

It helps me to learn things in different languages, even if it's just phonetically, and to make myself vulnerable to other audiences by trying to reflect back to them the genius of their own cultures, and to do that, oftentimes, in new jazz settings, new arrangements. It's a way to show respect.

~ Kurt Elling

People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

~ Thomas Carlyle

I didn't want to be a genius! That ain't cool.

~ Missy Elliott

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

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.

~ Umberto Eco

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

~ Bernard Williams

I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Genius is never understood in its own time.

~ Bill Watterson

Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.

~ George Henry Lewes

Talent works, genius creates.

~ Robert Schumann

Talent is a faculty that is highly developed, but genius commands all the faculties.

~ Francis Herbert Hedge

No one can arrive from being talented alone, work transforms talent into genius.

~ Anna Pavlova

What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

~ Eugène Delacroix

The most famous actress who did the 'dumb blond' routine was Marilyn Monroe, but she was a genius actress.

~ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

~ Henry David Thoreau

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

~ Alexander Pope

The capacity of the female mind for studies of the highest order cannot be doubted, having been sufficiently illustrated by its works of genius, of erudition, and of science.

~ James Madison