Genius Quotes, Quotations & Sayings

Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede - not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can’t count above fourteen.
G. C. Lichtenberg

The poet’s scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. The Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.
Edmund Spenser

There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.
Walt Whitman

He was a genius. To think all these years on his comedy is still making us laugh.
Eddie Izzard on Charlie Chaplin

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 which we are missing.
Gamal Abdel Nasser

Silence is the genius of fools and one of the virtues of the wise.
Bernard de Bonnard

The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds.
David Hume

Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
Oscar Wilde

There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Victor Hugo

The perfection of conversational intercourse is when the breeding of high life is animated by the fervour of genius.
Leigh Hunt

The word “genius” isn’t applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.
Joe Theisman

If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.
Joseph Addison

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

The man who succeeds above his fellows is the one who early in life, clearly discerns his object, and towards that object habitually directs his powers. Even genius itself is but fine observation strengthened by fixity of purpose. Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius.
Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
Terry Pratchett

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

Then indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting o’er lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.
Joseph Addison

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

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
Plato

A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.
Charles Caleb Colton

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

Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.
Alexander Hamilton

Great Wits are sure to Madness near alli’d
And thin Partitions do their Bounds divide.
John Dryden

Genius is sorrow’s child.
John Adams

The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement in a manner that would be amusingly absurd were it not so monstrously unjust and socially harmful.
Anna Garlin Spencer

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.
Henry B. Adams

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