Quotations about Genius

Men of genius are meteors destined to burn themselves out in lighting up their age.  ~Napoleon Bonaparte, Discours de Lyon, 1771


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


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


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


I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.  ~John F. Kennedy, in an address to Nobel Prize winners


Every true genius is bound to be naive.  ~J.C.F. von Schiller


Genius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path of fire for its vivid power.  ~Phillips Brooks


I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect, either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.  ~Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, 1911


I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know.  Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.  ~Buckminster Fuller


Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered - either by themselves or by others.  ~Mark Twain


Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.  ~James Russell Lowell, Literary Essays


The reluctance to put away childish things may be a requirement of genius.  ~Rebecca Pepper Sinkler


If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.  ~Robert S. Lynd


In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self Reliance," Essays, 1841


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


Genius is a plodding intellect, incapable of dreaming up the obstacles that stop the rest of us.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


There is no great genius without some touch of madness.  ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca, "On Tranquillity of the Mind," Moral Essays


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


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


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


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


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


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


People ask how I think up my thoughts.  Mostly I think them up while reading Paul Simon's lyrics.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


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


A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.  ~Charles Caleb Colton