Genius Quotes

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India is Gandhi's country of birth; South Africa his country of adoption. He was both an Indian and a South African citizen. Both countries contributed to his intellectual and moral genius, and he shaped the liberatory movements in both colonial theaters.
He is the archetypal anticolonial revolutionary. His strategy of noncooperation, his assertion that we can be dominated only if we cooperate with our dominators, and his nonviolent resistance inspired anticolonial and antiracist movements internationally in our century.

There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. … He is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Jean de La Bruyère

The genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land.

Thomas Jefferson

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.

It is possible that the production of genius is reserved to a limited period of mankind's history.

Friedrich Nietzsche

This pride of race is a quality which the German, fundamentally, does not possess. The reason for this is that for these last three centuries the country has been torn by internal dissension and religious wars and has been subjected to a variety of foreign influences, to the influence, for example, of Christianity—for Christianity is not a natural religion for the Germans, but a religion that has been imported and which strikes no responsive chord in their hearts and is foreign to the inherent genius of the race.

Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life".

Ralph Waldo Emerson

One must indeed be ignorant of the methods of genius to suppose that it allows itself to be cramped by forms. Forms are for mediocrity, and it is fortunate that mediocrity can act only according to routine. Ability takes its flight unhindered.

Napoleon I of France

What opposite discoveries we have seen!
(Signs of true genius, and of empty pockets.)
One makes new noses, one a guillotine,
One breaks your bones, one sets them in their sockets;
But vaccination certainly has been
A kind antithesis to Congreve's rockets,...

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.

George Bernard Shaw

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Genius is formed in quiet, character in the stream of human life.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.

William Shakespeare

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

Abraham Lincoln

Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly.

The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius...

I divide my time as follows: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep, for that would be a pity, for sleeping is the highest accomplishment of genius.

Søren Kierkegaard

Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The insincerity of man-all men are liars, partial or hiders of facts, half tellers of truths, shirks, moral sneaks. When a merely honest man appears he is a comet-his fame is eternal-needs no genius, no talent-mere honesty

"They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work."

Arthur Conan Doyle

Gentleness, good treatment, honor the victor and dishonor the vanquished, who should remain aloof and owe nothing to pity — In war, audacity is the finest calculation of genius.

Napoleon I of France

The genius, wit, and spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.