Quotations: Genius

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extrordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.
Douglas Adams

A genius is one who shoots at something no one else can see - and hits it.
Anon

Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!
Honore de Balzac

Genius ain't anything more than elegant common sense.
Josh Billings

Men of genius are meteors destined to burn themselves out in lighting up their age.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Genius is nothing but a great aptitude for patience.
George-Louis de Buffon

Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds.
Samuel Butler

This is the nature of genius, to be able to grasp the knowable even when no one else recognizes that it is present.
Deepak Chopra

Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.
Robertson Davies

Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.
Robertson Davies

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Thomas Alva Edison

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man's crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.
William Hazlitt

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
Elbert Hubbard

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
James Joyce

Geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify people, cleanse the air.
Søren Kierkegaard

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
Oscar Levant

What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
Oscar Levant

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Carl Sagan

The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.
Arthur M. Schlesinger

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
E. F. Schumacher

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.
George Bernard Shaw

A chess genius is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.
George Steiner

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift

Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.
Edgard Varese

I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring.
James McNeill Whistler

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
E.B. White

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Oscar Wilde