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Who is a genius?

Who in the same given time can produce more than others has vigor; who can produce more and better has talents; who can produce what none else can has genius.
—Johann Kaspar Lavater

Genius: to know without having learned, to draw just conclusions from unknown premises, to discern the soul of things.
—Ambrose Bierce

All genius is a conquering of chaos and mystery.
—Otto Weininger

To see things in the seed, that is genius.
—Lao Tzu

The difference between being able to understand something and inventing it in the first place is called genius.
—Craig Bruce

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
—Vladimir Nabokov

The genius is he who sees what is not yet and causes it to come to be.
—Peter Nivio Zarlenga

Genius is the very eye of intellect and the wing of thought; it is always in advance of its time and is the pioneer for the generation which it precedes.
—William Gilmore Simms

First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.
—Robert Graves

Genius is initiative on fire.
—Holbrook Jackson

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
—Ezra Pound

Genius and the thought process

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.
—Leonardo da Vinci

It takes a lot of time to be a genius—you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
—Gertrude Stein

Man is a genius when he is dreaming.
—Akira Kurosawa

Genius has a fresh point of view

One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire.
—John W. Foster

Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
—William James

Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.
—Havelock Ellis

Genius and talent

Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
—Henri Frederic Amiel

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.
—Bern Williams

Talent does what it can; genius does what it must.
—Robert Bulwer-Lytton

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

Talent works, genius creates.
—Robert Schumann

Genius and labor

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

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not—nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not—unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
—Calvin Coolidge

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance, by cleanliness and hard work.
—Virginia Woolf

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
—Thomas Carlyle

Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
—Joseph Joubert

The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water.
—Stendhal

For thirty-seven years I have practiced fourteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius.
—Pablo de Sarasate

Genius and enthusiasm

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.
—Benjamin Disraeli

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
—Aldous Huxley

Genius blooms in adversity

Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.
—Horace

Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men—poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius.
—Albert Pike

Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.
—Denis Diderot

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.
—Georg C. Lichtenberg

Genius and the educational system

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
—Benjamin Franklin

Learning is the ally, not the adversary, of genius—he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.
—William Godwin

Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.
—Bernard Berenson

If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.
—William Hazlitt

To sentence a man of true genius to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If my impressions are correct, our educational planning mill cuts down all the knots of genius and reduces the best of the men who go through it to much the same standard.
—Simon Newcomb

Genius and freedom

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.
—James Russell Lowell

Rules and models destroy genius and art.
—William Hazlitt

If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not—and the odds are against it —go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper, write.
—J. B. Priestley

Genius defies convention

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
—Abraham Lincoln

Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men as lunatics.
—Cesare Lombroso

Genius is inborn

Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought, but genius must be born and never can be taught.
—John Dryden

Nothing is so envied as genius: nothing so hopeless of attainment by labor alone. Though labor always accompanies the greatest genius, without the intellectual gift, labor alone will do little.
—B. R. Hayden

Creative genius is a divinely bestowed gift which is the coronation of the few.
—Margaret E. Sangster

Genius is ahead of time

Genius is never understood in its own time.
—Bill Watterson

Genius always finds itself a century too early.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.
—Joseph Lewis

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.
—Carl Sandburg

Genius lives long

The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.
—Edmund Spenser

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 H. Lewes

Genius and weirdness

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
—Aristotle

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character had abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
—John Stuart Mill

The curse of a genius

A genius is one who can do anything except make a living.
—Joey Lauren Adams

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

Every positive value has its price in negative terms—the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
—Pablo Picasso

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.
—Mary MacLane

Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul.
—Mary MacLane

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

Genius and public

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

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

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.
—Henri Bergson

Genius and mediocrity

Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe.
—Benjamin Disraeli

Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.
—Oscar Wilde

In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.
—Robert Green Ingersoll

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
—George Steiner

Genius and stupidity

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

I am all in favor of the democratic principle that one idiot is as good as one genius, but I draw the line when someone takes the next step and concludes that two idiots are better than one genius.
—Leo Szilard

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

An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark—that is critical genius.
—Billy Wilder

Geniuses

All the genius I have lies in this: when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly.
—Alexander Hamilton Stephens

In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.
—Steve Wozniak

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
—Vladimir Nabokov

People hate me because I am a multifaceted, talented, wealthy, internationally famous genius.
—Jerry Lewis

Churchill was one of the few men I have met who even in the flesh give me the impression of genius. George Bernard Shaw is another. It is amusing to know that each thinks the other is overrated.
—David Low

Doorman—a genius who can open the door of your car with one hand, help you in with the other, and still have one left for the tip.
—Dorothy Kilgallen

Other

Genius: the superhuman in man.
—Victor Hugo

There is no off position on the genius switch.
—David Letterman

Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.
—William Hazlitt

Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.
—Edward Gibbon

Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The true genius shudders at incompleteness and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
—Edgar Allan Poe

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
—Thomas B. Macaulay

The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
—Walter Lippmann

To be powerful you must be strong, and to have dominion you must have a genius for organizing.
—John Henry Newman

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.
—George Eliot

Moderation is the inseparable companion of wisdom, but with it genius has not even a nodding acquaintance.
—Charles Caleb Colton

Genius is independent of situation.
—Charles Churchill

Genius is of no country.
—Charles Churchill

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

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.
—Victor Hugo

Rising genius always shoots out its rays from among the clouds, but these will gradually roll away and disappear as it ascends to its steady luster.
—Washington Irving

Genius is an overused word. The world has known only about a half dozen geniuses. I got only fairly near.
—Fritz Kreisler

The dread of censure is the death of genius.
—William Gilmore Simms

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.
—Henry David Thoreau

If beauty isn't genius it usually signals at least a high level of animal cunning.
—Peter York

If you hype something and it succeeds, you're a genius—it wasn't a hype. If you hype it and it fails, then it was just a hype.
—Neil Bogart

You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.
—Louisa May Alcott
 

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