Genius Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Arthur Schopenhauer

Simone de Beauvoir

Thomas Edison

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Steve Jobs

Arthur Conan Doyle

Marilyn Monroe

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.

Simone de Beauvoir

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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

Arthur Schopenhauer

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

He who would acquire fame must not show himself afraid of censure. The dread of censure is the death of genius.

William Gilmore Simms

These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by the scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts—the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.

Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.

But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched with the same madness and genius.

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

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.

Of Harold Macmillan

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

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

I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now!"

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing.

Gamal Abdel Nasser

My evil genius Procrastination has whispered me to tarry 'til a more convenient season.

Mary Todd Lincoln

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Herbert Beerbohm Tree

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

As we discern a fine line between crank and genius, so also (and unfortunately) we must acknowledge an equally graded trajectory from crank to demagogue. When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

Stephen Jay Gould

This was Shakespeare's form;
Who walked in every path of human life,
Felt every passion; and to all mankind
Doth now, will ever, that experience yield
Which his own genius only could acquire.

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Vladimir Nabokov