Quotes about Genius

"The first and last thing required of genius is the love of truth."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Beware of dissipating your powers; strive constantly to concentrate them. Genius thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but is sure to repent of every ill-judged outlay."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

"In every work of genius we see our own rejected thoughts."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness."
-Aristotle

"There was never a genius without a tincture of madness."
-Aristotle

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

"Since when was genius found respectable?"
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"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

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

"There is no great genius without some touch of madness."
-Seneca

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

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

"Be you in what line of life you may, it will be amongst your misfortunes if you have not time properly to attend to pecuniary [monetary] matters. Want of attention to these matters has impeded the progress of science and of genius itself."
-William Cobbett

"To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education."
-John Buchan

"In the world which we know, among the different and primitive geniuses that preside over the evolution of the several species, there exists not one, excepting that of the dog, that ever gave a thought to the presence of man."
-Maurice Maeterlinck

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

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

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

"The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency."
-Margaret Lee Runbeck

"Genius is talent set on fire by courage."
-Henry Van Dyke

"Genius can do much, but even genius falls short of the actuality of a single human life."
-Hamilton Wright Mabie

"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

"Genius is the gold in the mine; talent is the miner who works and brings it out."
-Marguerite Blessington

"Genius is nothing but a greater aptitude for patience."
-George louis Leclerc De Buffon

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

"The genius of our institutions is democratic - baseball is a democratic game."
-Al Spalding