Top 100 Not Genius Quotes
#1. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or do in a circumstance unexpected by other people: it is reflection, meditation.
Andrew Roberts
#2. If I always appear prepared, it is because before entering an undertaking, I have meditated long and have foreseen what might occur. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly and secretly what I should do in circumstances unexpected by others; it is thought and preparation
Napoleon Bonaparte
#3. I envy no quality of the mind or intellect in others; not genius, power, wit, nor fancy; but, if I could choose what would be most delightful, and, I believe, most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing.
Humphry Davy
#4. Why have I not genius to start some new thought? Some thing that will surprise the world?
John Adams
#5. All great enterprises are about logistics. Not genius or inspiration or flights of imagination, skill or cunning, but logistics.
Tom McCarthy
#6. How are men to be secured in any rights without instruction; how to be secured in the equal exercise of those rights without equality of instruction? By instruction understand me to mean knowledge - just knowledge; not talent, not genius, not inventive mental powers.
Frances Wright
#7. Eakins rejected gentlemen athletics as his theme. Instead, he took a subject that had been the stuff of illustrated weeklies and the penny press and turned it into fine art. Eakins celebrates not fire from heaven but honest sweat, not genius but hard work.
Barry S. Strauss
#9. Wanderlust. These are words that I associate with him now. Not genius. Not gifted. Extraordinary in any way.
Abigail George
#10. 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
#11. It is perseverance, and not genius that takes a man to the top. Rome is full of unrecognized geniuses. Only perseverance enables you to move forward in the world.
Robert Harris
#12. There is one qualification the manager cannot acquire but must bring to the task. It is not genius; it is character.
Peter Drucker
#13. 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
#14. Could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world. It
Virginia Woolf
#15. Genius does not seem to derive any great support from syllogisms. Its carriage is free; its manner has a touch of inspiration. We see it come, but we never see it walk.
Joseph De Maistre
#16. The genius does not differ from others in their access to the light within, only in their confident acceptance of its natural outstreaming.
Eric Butterworth
#17. The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.
Eric Ries
#18. Ebenezar blinked . Then he turned his face to me his expression clearly asking whether or not I was out of my damned mind .
"Wile E. Coyote" I said to him soberly . "Suuuuuuper Genius
Jim Butcher
#19. The real people of genius were resolute workers not idle dreamers.
George Henry Lewes
#20. The problem was Le Corbusier was a genius and an enormous artist, but he tried to resolve problems to which there is no solution. So the idea to demolish the centre of Paris in order to adapt it to the car - he drew it! - is something not even the most bloody dictators conceived.
Leon Krier
#21. To move the earth like Archimedes, one needs not a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it. There is an easier way: Give a genius a beautiful remote house in a green valley where he can think calmly, and he shall move the earth with ideas!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#22. Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention ... But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.
William James
#23. Physicians can't really dictate our protocols. They can inform us to the extent that they can as to what would best serve us, because we're not medical geniuses, no human being is, but intrinsically there is inside of each one of us, the knowing of what's going on.
Maya Tiwari
#24. Humble birth did not retard his genius, nor high place corrupt his soul.
Cass Gilbert
#25. I might not be all that good with mathematics in class; but go into my mind; and you will see that type of mathematic I put in; in my everyday life, and you can say that I am genius in a way in the terms of mentality; but retarded in class.
Temitope Owosela
#26. Girls are genius at getting through sexual abuse. Often the only way to get through is not to feel. And that is exactly what these fantasy worlds allow: They give girls a place to go so they don't have to be present in their violated bodies. Brilliant.
Patti Feuereisen
#27. In this world is not the creative act of the genius always a protest against the inertia of the mass?
Adolf Hitler
#28. People are like, 'Wow you started your own record label,' and treat me like I'm some sort of innovative genius, when I'm not at all. You've got the Internet and music - you put them together, and people hear your music.
Courtney Barnett
#29. I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel - everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.
Mary MacLane
#30. Evidently, one thing seems to have more value in direct proportion to whether or not we feel we have the freedoms, joys or conveniences of that thing.
David Brier
#31. Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.
Walter Lippmann
#32. You can't hang around geniuses forever because they end up taking everything you've got. That's why they're the genius and you're not.
Bob Colacello
#33. If people are always comfortable with you, you're probably not telling them the whole truth.
Aniekee Tochukwu Ezekiel
#34. Genius has its limitations.
Insanity ... not so much -Bumper Sticker
Darynda Jones
#35. Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet - in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius.
Richard Flanagan
#36. There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#37. Indulge, and to thy genius freely give,
For not to live at ease is not to live.
Aulus Persius Flaccus
#38. This homage has been rendered not to me - for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me - but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#39. A great scientist once said that genius consists not in making great discoveries but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
Walker Percy
#40. Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men.
Gerald Weinberg
#41. Genius has somewhat of the infantine; but of the childish not a touch or taint.
Robert Browning
#42. Genius moves to creation, not to destruction. Only a very few have combined both.
Edith Hamilton
#43. Genius is an inner inherent intuition and perception. It is not a teachable condition.
Debasish Mridha
#44. Never expect any recognition here
the system prohibits it. The cross is not affixed to the genius, no, the genius is affixed to the cross.
Franz Grillparzer
#45. Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek for material and continually form itself around it.Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a 'miracle.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#46. When you're young you believe it when people tell you how good you are. And that's the danger, you inhale. Everyone will tell you you're a genius, which you are not, and if you understand that, you win.
George Clooney
#47. Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor a demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is nothing but the fact. And he is not only the Italian fact; he is the European fact, the fact of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the presence of the moral idea of the nineteenth.
Victor Hugo
#48. Bow to genius, but to the authority of that genius - not the display of talent ...
John Geddes
#49. I started off thinking Eminem was a flash in the pan, a kind of hip-hop Hanson brother. How wrong I was. Recovery is sometimes funny, sometimes terrible, always painfully honest. The matching of Eminem and Rihanna on "Love the Way You Lie" is pure genius. "Not Afraid" is pretty great too.
Stephen King
#50. It is commonly the personal character of a writer which gives him his public significance. It is not imparted by his genius. Napoleon said of Corneille, "Were he living I would make him a king;" but he did not read him. He read Racine, yet he said nothing of the kind of Racine.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#51. Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.
Robert Henri
#52. Yes, it made sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did not expect to do it himself.
Arthur C. Clarke
#53. How many geniuses die undiscovered, not only by others but, more sadly, by themselves?
Joyce Wycoff
#54. You look around the world at geniuses, and they don't appear randomly, they appear in genius clusters. Athens in 50 BC, Florence 1500, Silicon Valley today. This is not a coincidence.
Eric Weiner
#55. What about this? A colony of nothing but Battle School grads. If they bred true, they'd be the smartest military minds in the galaxy.
Then they'd come home and take over Earth.
OK, not that.
Orson Scott Card
#56. Pseudo-artists think that being an artist means opposing whatever seems to be an establishment. That is not creative at all. True creativity is the ability to gain perspective wherever you may have missed it before.
Criss Jami
#58. But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.
Truman Capote
#59. You go to college not only for the latest knowledge but also to meet people from different backgrounds. That's the genius of the American higher-education system compared with the Europeans'. We don't simply skim the elite.
Donna Shalala
#60. The truth about not having everything you need, not being fully equipped or qualified or allowed is that these limits are the nebula of creative genius. When you have total freedom i.e: no limits at all. You stop trying to make the best of things
Augusten Burroughs
#61. The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
#62. 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
#63. Cronkite is not a genius at anything except being straight, honest, and normal.
Douglas Brinkley
#64. All preceptors should have that kind of genius described by Tacitus, "equal to their business, but not above it;" a patient industry, with competent erudition; a mind depending more on its correctness than its originality, and on its memory rather than on its invention.
Charles Caleb Colton
#65. An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#66. I have no physical genius about me. I can't dribble a ball and run at the same time, I can't do lay-ups - I'm not an athlete. But my experience as a kid was, I was made fun of so much that what I did then, is, I wouldn't participate. And I think I cheated myself out of a lot of fun.
Rich Mullins
#67. A truly great life. That is what humanity deserves. Not an average life, not even a normal one-a life in which genius is not an anomaly but an expectation. But to achieve such things
Madeleine Roux
#68. I have never met the man who had vision large enough to appreciate my genius," he said simply. "Perhaps it was not to be expected.
Georgette Heyer
#69. A sniper is like a genius - it's not enough to be one, you have to be one at something.
Steve Aylett
#70. That genius is a rare exception ( It's not true. Talent and genius have been wasted on enormous scale throughout our history; this is all I know for sure.
Eric Hoffer
#71. I worship nothing. Not a good lie nor a dark one. If nature is proof of God's amazing creation then I have truly seen the light, and the light is black. Nature is genius at its most cruel and savage. No benevolent God could have come up with such an outrage.
Gary Numan
#72. Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
Vladimir Nabokov
#73. And indeed if you think you're a genius at something what you achieve is very much according to your expectations; if you think you're no good, you're not going to get anywhere.
Diana Wynne Jones
#74. What is it, the difference between ordinary people and those with genius? Not just ordinary people either. Intelligent people, sensitive ones, exceptionally talented ones. Even people like Sonja who give everything and then more, who work harder than seems possible on the thing they love.
Anna Smaill
#76. For the infinite player, seeing as genius, nature is the absolutely unlike. The infinite player recognizes nothing on the face of nature. Nature displays not only its indifference to human existence but its difference as well.
James P. Carse
#77. To beat Federer 3 times does not mean anything he is a genius whose hair does not even move when he plays.
Guillermo Canas
#78. Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.
William Hazlitt
#79. The greatest natural resource our country has is not oil. It's not gas. It's not coal. It's the genius of our children.
Cory Booker
#80. I've worked with genius performers. Sometimes they created great work with a bad script ... but not often. Play it safe: write well.
Jerry Juhl
#81. And soon all our minds will be flat as a pancake,
With no room for genius exaltation or heartache.
And our children and theirs will preen, smirk and chatter,
With not even the sense to ask what is the matter.
Stevie Smith
#82. And they were deeply moved not so much by the poetry as by their sensitivity to poetry; not so much by the genius of the poem as by their wisdom in understanding the poem; not in knowing the poem but in knowing the poem demonstrated the higher side of themselves and of the Japanese spirit -
Richard Flanagan
#83. It is not in the outward and visible world of material life that the Celtic genius of Wales or Ireland can at this day hope to count for much; it is in the inward world of thought and science.What it has been, what is has done, what it will be or will do, as a matter of modern politics.
Matthew Arnold
#84. Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones.
Samuel Johnson
#85. To see every day how people get the name 'genius' just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name 'millipede'-not because they have that many feet, but because most people don't want to count to 14-this has had the result that I don't believe anyone any more without checking.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#86. Life is not about discovering our talents; it is about pushing our talents to the limit and discovering our genius.
Robert Breault
#88. Fella's a genius. Best ever by a distance in my life time. Never really saw Pele ... Souness, Gullit, Venables and now Rooney agree Messi is the best they have seen. He plays a game with which we are not familiar.
Gary Lineker
#89. The prevailing view is that geniuses are largely built, not born.
David Brooks
#90. There is a genius on one side of every trade and a dolt on the other, but which is which does not become clear until much later,
Leon Levy
#91. Censor, n. An officer of certain governments, employed to supress the works of genius. Among the Romans the censor was an inspector of public morals, but the public morals of modern nations will not bear inspection.
Ambrose Bierce
#92. The critic is beneath the maker, but is his needed friend. The critic is not a base caviler, but the younger brother of genius. Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty. And of making others appreciate it ...
Margaret Fuller
#93. Seinfeld has his way of telling jokes - and I'm not comparing myself to Seinfeld, his genius is observing the small details of everyday life and finding humor in it.
Nick Kroll
#94. Men spoke much in my boyhood about restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it's a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#95. The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas; perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.
Walter Lippmann
#96. Not being a genius, I believe in collaboration, and my background as a problem solver means I've never been afraid to work with people cleverer than myself.
Daniel Barber
#97. As was your mother, you have been given the fatal gift of genius. Because of it, your life will not be an easy one - nor must you expect it to be. You must remember always that great gifts come at great cost.
Alan Bradley
#98. Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.
George Henry Lewes
#99. The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.
Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper
#100. Genius has its fatality. Must we not see in its works a manifestation of the will of Providence?
Arsene Houssaye
