Genius Quotes

The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.

Lydia Maria Child

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.

Simone de Beauvoir

Everybody denies I am a genius --but nobody ever called me one!

Orson Welles

Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.

Christian Nevell Bovee

Genius is independent of situation.

Charles Churchill

It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.

James Russell Lowell

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 BulwerLytton

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.

Antonin Artaud

Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.

Germaine De Stael

Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.

Max Beerbohm

What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.

G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb

The function of genius is to furnish cretins with ideas twenty years later.

Louis Aragon

Genius is sorrow's child.

John Adams

His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.

Thomas Alva Edison

Who in the same given time can produce more than others has vigor; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

Genius is the ability to act rightly without precedent -- the power to do the right thing the first time.

Elbert Hubbard

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Pablo Picasso

It is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.

Pablo Picasso

Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.

Henry Ward Beecher

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Mary Webb