Top 100 On Genius Quotes
#1. After upwards of two thousand years Epicurus has been exonerated from the reproach that the doctrines of his philosophy recommended the pleasures of sensuality and voluptuousness as the chief good. Calumny may rest on genius a considerable part of a world's duration; what then is the value of fame?
William Benton Clulow
#2. The simplest of women are wonderful liars who can extricate themselves from the most difficult dilemmas with a skill bordering on genius.
Guy De Maupassant
#3. Picasso, Michelangelo, possibly, might be verging on genius, but I don't think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius.
Damien Hirst
#4. Some were brilliant bordering on genius. Others, genius bordering on madness
Erich Segal
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Evil is boring. Cynicism is pointless. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Hopelessness is self-indulgent. On the other hand: Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Chronic ecstasy is a learnable skill.
Rob Brezsny
#8. The highest wisdom and the highest genius have been invariably accompanied with cheerfulness. We have sufficient proofs on record that Shakespeare and Socrates were the most festive companions.
Thomas Love Peacock
#9. On a train from Shimla to Delhi, there was a halt in one of the stations. The train stopped by for few minutes as usual. Sachin was nearing century, batting on 98. The passengers, railway officials, everyone on the train waited for Sachin to complete the century. This Genius can stop time in India!
Peter Roebuck
#10. By the time the clever reaches the clouds, the genius is already on the stars.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#11. I do love the clothes on 'Mad Men' because my character has been so elegant and I would never have had access to these clothes. I think Janie Bryant is a costume designing genius. They'll call and tell me, 'It will only take an hour,' and I'm like, 'I will try on the whole truck!'
Cara Buono
#12. Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur.
Janet Flanner
#13. Well, Bradbury's a genius. Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books of all time, and The Illustrated Man as a collection of short stories ranks up there. When you read it you realize how influential it is on so many other stories and people.
Zack Snyder
#14. Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat, as James Brown and Prince can, has my eternal respect. Prince, who is a genius of the highest order, can come back up while singing and playing the guitar.
Bill Nighy
#15. Charlie Parker and Art Tatum to me were genius, and I'm right below that. I did, in my own way, do something different on the instrument, and that's the way I'd like to be remembered.
Buddy DeFranco
#16. Mozart. Vivaldi. Van Gogh. Stretched their genius on struggle, stress and survival.
Billy Cannon
#17. 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
#18. The technical brilliance of Lang Lang and the musical genius to create a masterpiece on the spot.
Ian Brown
#19. Many studies of research scientists have shown that achievement (at least below the genius level of an Einstein, Bohr, or a Planck) depends less on ability in doing research than on the courage to go after opportunity.
Peter Drucker
#20. A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
Emile M. Cioran
#21. 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
#22. Mild autism can give you a genius like Einstein. If you have severe autism, you could remain nonverbal. You don't want people to be on the severe end of the spectrum. But if you got rid of all the autism genetics, you wouldn't have science or art. All you would have is a bunch of social 'yak yaks.'
Temple Grandin
#23. It's a weird thing where, especially in jazz, you have to totally mention cutting sessions and people one-upping each other and people being super, super tough on each other. And out of it emerge these genius musicians.
Damien Chazelle
#25. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.
Pat Conroy
#26. I remember when I posed as a customs officer so that I could meet Oscar Wilde. I said to him "Have you anything to declare?" He said "I have nothing to declare but my genius." I said "I'll put that down as nothing then shall I?" For I am the wittiest man on Earth.
Simon Munnery
#27. The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.
Aneurin Bevan
#28. 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
#29. Geniuses must never die, the progress of mankind depends on us
Salvador Dali
#30. Genius without religion is only a lamp on the outer gate of a palace; it may serve to cast a gleam of light on those that are without, while the inhabitant sits in darkness.
Hannah More
#31. Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong - wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.
Jack Kemp
#32. 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
#33. The landscape had been so maimed by this new kind of warfare it was as if human architects of great genius had sat down to plan hell, since no two of them could agree on the design of heaven.
Christopher Buehlman
#34. 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
#36. A critic is never too severe when he only detects the faults of an author. But he is worse than too severe when, in consequence of this detection, be presumes to place himself on a level with genius.
Walter Savage Landor
#37. God's genius is as wide as the cosmos, while by comparison our intelligence can find room on the head of a pin.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#38. My husband wrote me love letters while I was on location in Canada and pregnant. They turned into being about food, and it turned it into a cookbook. He called it 'The Tuscan Cookbook for the Pregnant Male.' It was kind of genius. When I took it a book agent, he was like, 'Men don't buy cookbooks.'
Debi Mazar
#39. Strange mystery of our nature, that those in whom genius develops itself in imagination, thus taking its most ethereal form, should yet be the most dependent on the opinions of others!
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
#40. 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
#41. After making a mistake or suffering a misfortune, the man of genius always gets back on his feet.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#42. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.
Abraham Lincoln
#43. 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
#44. No company should depend on one person no matter how that person is smart or genius, whether it's Apple or News Corp, or Citibank or any other company in the world.
Al-Waleed Bin Talal
#45. Don't forget that Mozart worked on commission. He almost always would write something if he knew exactly who was paying for it and where it would be performed. So you can't really separate the creation of genius from the appreciation of it.
Eric Weiner
#46. We, the salt of the earth, should endeavor to follow, by never letting anything disturb us in the pursuit of our intellectual life, however much the storm of the world may invade and agitate our personal environment.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#47. 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
#48. There are so many cliches associated with mental health - such as the 'fine line between lunacy and genius' - which are, on the whole, a load of rubbish.
Jo Brand
#49. Did you hear about this genius that got on a plane and set fire to his feet? Turns out he had bombs in his shoes and the problem all started when the flight attendants asked him nicely to extinguish his feet. He was wearing exploding sneakers. The new Nike Air-Jihads!
David Letterman
#50. A lot of writers dream of feature films, but television - by way of TNT, CBS, Lifetime, and Hallmark Hall of Fame - has always called my name. And after seeing 'True Detective,' can there be any doubt that the storytelling on TV is as genius as it gets?
Luanne Rice
#51. His [Michael Jackson] behavior was weird, but when you get an artist and a genius, many of the geniuses throughout our whole history were weird. And they did weird things because none of us could understand what was on their mind and why they did what they did.
Berry Gordy
#52. There are so many remarkable playwrights working right now, that I see everything I can. Annie Baker is a genius, I'll see anything she writes. The same for Lynn Nottage, Cynthia Hopkins, and Lisa D'Amour. Anything they've got going on, I'll go see.
Lucy Alibar
#53. I love Stewart Lee's 'Comedy Vehicle' on BBC2. The guy is a genius.
Jez Butterworth
#54. When the brain's potential is fully unleashed, there can be few if any limitations. Anyone who tells you otherwise isn't up-to-date with the latest scientific findings on the brain and is exhibiting their ignorance. For the brain's potential is the human potential ...
James Morcan
#55. I had that overwhelming feeling I get when I'm about to give up on a plan, that big rush of air when I realize that my stroke of genius has flaws, and I don't have the brains or energy to fix them.
Gillian Flynn
#56. Also, the advice we were given as children when confronted with failure, "forget it and move on," is dead wrong. "Remember it and move on" is the way of the genius. I
Eric Weiner
#57. A fish is a genius in water.
An eagle is a genius in air.
A fox is a genius on land.
A sage is a genius in life.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#58. I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it's not pretty.
Charles Bukowski
#59. Brain researchers estimate that your unconscious data base outweighs the conscious on an order exceeding ten million to one. This data base is the source of you hidden, natural genius. In other words, a part of you is much smarter than you are.
Michael J. Gelb
#60. If we treat each other as if we are geniuses, poets and artists, we have a better chance of becoming that on stage.
Del Close
#61. Anyone can put paint on a canvas, but only a true master can bring the painting to life. Anyone can kill, but only a genius can make murder an art.
Shaun Jeffrey
#63. If there be anything that can be called genius, it consists chiefly in ability to give that attention to a subject which keeps it steadily in the mind, till we have surveyed it accurately on all sides.
Robert Quillen
#64. The three theater peeps I would love to dine with are Mel Brooks, because he is so funny; Stephen Sondheim, because he is a god-like genius; and Ethel Merman, to compare notes on fabulous belting.
Nancy Allen
#65. Anybody who is stupid enough often stumbles on an effect that could never be thought up by the most brilliant. I suspect that there is a thing which you might call the genius of stupidity.
Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett
#66. First, make yourself a reputation for being a creative genius. Second, surround yourself with partners who are better than you are. Third, leave them to go get on with it.
David Ogilvy
#68. Arts and sciences in one and the same century have arrived at great perfection; and no wonder, since every age has a kind of universal genius, which inclines those that live in it to some particular studies; the work then, being pushed on by many hands, must go forward.
John Dryden
#69. I am not worthy to be on a Mariah Carey record. She's a true artist, so I just step back and watch the genius occur.
Nick Cannon
#71. I'm on his death list, too." "Then why are you still alive?" asked Peter. "Because, contrary to widespread belief, Achilles is not a genius and he makes mistakes.
Orson Scott Card
#72. If you think about it, Jesus was this religious genius who grows up on the Silk Road, and so He's getting from the West all these Greek ideas from Plato about body and soul.
Jay Parini
#73. There's a thin line between genius and bottom-barrel stupidness. I hover delicately on a tightrope between the two, wondering where I'll land if I'll ever fall.
Suzanne Crowley
#74. The best thing to do - usually - was to let him play these things out. Who was I to tell a genius it was time to put his clothes back on?
Kristopher Jansma
#75. Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#76. And is that all you can say for him?" cried Marianne, indignantly. "But what are his manners on more intimate acquaintance? What his pursuits, his talents, and genius?" Sir John was rather puzzled.
Jane Austen
#77. The problems we discover on our own are the ones that motivate us the most
Eric Weiner
#78. When he turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought they saw decided genius in this coruscation. Mr. Casaubon, on the contrary, stood rayless.
George Eliot
#79. I'm a big fan of '30 Rock,' which I think is the most genius show on television.
Anna Kendrick
#80. The art of land warfare is an art of genius, of inspiration. On the sea nothing is genius or inspiration; everything is positive or empiric.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#81. Clever man is a chicken; it can fly, but a little. Genius, on the other hand, is a migratory bird; it can fly at high altitudes until He disappears on the horizon!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#82. This reasoning is based on the wishful thinking that genius can only be earned through education and hard work. It denies the time-proven truth that genius can strike like a random bolt of lightning, at any time in any place, even in a humble glover's home in a small town in Elizabethan England.
Andrea Mays
#83. I don't think you can be involved in film and not be a fan of theirs. The one that I just go back to and can watch anytime it's on TV and I'll watch to the end, is Fargo. I think it's, like, a perfect film, it's genius.
Kelly Macdonald
#85. I sleep till one, and I'm always surprised when someone in blue rinse on a talk show says, 'You're a genius, Mr. Newley, you do so many things.' Tony Newley never realized his potential, did the things he should have done.
Anthony Newley
#86. Outstanding examples of genius - a Mozart, a Shakespeare, or a Carl Friedrich Gauss - are markers on the path along which our species appears destined to tread.
Fred Hoyle
#87. I think some of my darkness comes from my dad. There is definitely convict history on that side of the family, a lot of dodginess. But with the darkness can also come entrepreneurialism, genius traits.
Rebel Wilson
#88. It is not difficult to grasp and express thoughts that float on the stream of current opinion: but to think and rightly utter what is permanently true and interesting, what shall appeal to the best minds a thousand years hence, as it appeals to them to-day, this is the work of genius.
John Lancaster Spalding
#89. We are called to give God a return on the investment of brilliance, genius and ingenuity that was engrained in our souls before we took our first breath.
Shannon Tanner
#90. On the road to your target, move cleverly and silently; when you reached your target, be humble and silent!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#91. Was genius ever ungrateful? Mere talents are dry leaves, tossed up and down by gusts of passion, and scattered and swept away; but, Genius lies on the bosom of Memory, and Gratitude at her feet.
Walter Savage Landor
#92. The first action of my life was the taking hold of my nose with both hands. My mother saw this and called me a genius:-my father wept for joy and presented me with a treatise on Nosology. This I mastered before I was breeched.
Edgar Allan Poe
#93. It's not like you get up on stage and you're immediately a genius. It takes a long time. So, don't be discouraged.
Bill Hader
#94. So we show up on her porch out of the blue, kidnap her, feed her frozen fruit and ask her on a date. Genius
Aprilynne Pike
#95. Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.
William Butler Yeats
#96. When I was at Cambridge in the early fifties, there was a school nearby for training Army officers in Russian, and some imaginative genius came up with the idea of putting on Russian plays with the students to improve their language skills.
Robert Gottlieb
#97. I also think if you're an actor and you can improvise, when you go on an audition and you can improvise you're just a genius. If you can, you know, take a Tide commercial and you can just say one funny line that's not in the commercial they think you're a genius.
Amy Poehler
#98. I wondered: if I was so hell-bent on chaos, why would I adopt a military rank? Perhaps there was a part of me that needed rules, needed regulations and order.
Steven Poore
#99. I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).
Ian McEwan
