Genius Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

When leadership rises to genius it has the power of transforming, of transforming experience into power. And that is what experience is for, to be made into power. The great leader creates as well as directs power.

Mary Parker Follett

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

A profound common sense is the best genius for statesmanship.

James Russell Lowell

From numberless books the fluttering reader, idle and inconstant, bears away the bloom that only clings to the outer leaf; but genius has its nectaries, delicate glands, and secrecies of sweetness, and upon these the thoughtful mind must settle in its labor, before the choice perfume of fancy and wisdom is drawn forth.

Robert Aris Willmott

There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably goes like this: Someone shrugs off the weight of his cultural traditions, ignores the baleful stares of authority, and does something his countrymen think to be completely batshit insane. Of those, Galileo was my personal favorite. Van Gogh comes in second, but he really was batshit insane.

I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.

Jeanette Winterson

There is a thin line between genius and insanity.
I have erased this line.

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.

Louis Auchincloss

The scientific genius is so like the old Hebrew prophet. He singles out the essential from the mass of facts before him, and then - lifts up his eyes.

Margaret Todd (doctor)

A field of clay touched by the genius of man becomes a castle.

We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other peoples' models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.

Common sense is better than genius, and hence its bestowment is more universal.

Of course he [Dante] was a genius, wasn't he – like Shakespeare? … He and Dante seem to have known everything … known what would always be true … Wonderful, I imagine that we're going to find that this is full of quotations.

Mister Speaker, I am not able to understand the mental organization of the man who can consider this bill, and the subject of which it treats, as free from very great difficulties. He must be a man of very moderate abilities, whose ignorance is bliss, or a man of transcendent genius, whom no difficulties can daunt and whose clear vision no cloud can obscure.

James A. Garfield

The greatest natural genius cannot subsist on its own stock: he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated. When we know the subject designed by such men, it will never be difficult to guess what kind of work is to be produced.

Joshua Reynolds

The universal social pressure upon women to be all alike, and do all the same things, and to be content with identical restrictions, has resulted not only in terrible suffering in the lives of exceptional women, but also in the loss of unmeasured feminine values in special gifts. The Drama of the Woman of Genius has too often been a tragedy of misshapen and perverted power.

Anna Garlin Spencer

Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

The critic does his utmost to blight genius in his infancy.

Thomas Love Peacock

Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.

Alfred North Whitehead

If a man can have only one kind of sense, let him have common sense. If he has that and uncommon sense too, he is not far from genius.

Henry Ward Beecher

The finest flowers of genius have grown in an atmosphere where those of Nature are prone to droop, and difficult to bring to maturity.

"I'm doing pretty good. I'm a seminal genius, they say, and I have the most sophisticated tools ever devised to work with. And I do build some good things for them. I'm quite successful. I'll tell you something, though. In the daytime, with all those sophisticated tools, and particularly if someone's watching me, I just stall around. But at night — "
"Ah, at night! What do you do then, Hondstarfer?"
"Put away those damned sophisticated tools and get my stone hammers. That's when I build the good stuff. Don't give me away, though, Roadstrum.

Genius is the summed production of the many with the names of the few attached for easy recall.

Whores — Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.