Genius Quotes

Towering genius disdains a beaten path.

Abraham Lincoln

When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Vari

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

Charles Baudelaire

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.

Samuel Butler

Genius is the gold in the mine; talent is the miner who works and brings it out.

Marguerite Blessington

The lamp of genius burns quicker than the lamp of life.

Friedrich von Schiller

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Aldous Huxley

Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders.

Desiderius Erasmus

Genius is entitled to respect only when it promotes the peace and improves the happiness of mankind.

Lord Essex

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man's crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artis

He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.

Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

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

Gertrude Stein

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

Thomas Alva Edison

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.

Heinrich Heine

The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.

Charles Caleb Colton

The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources.

Johann von Goethe

The first and last thing required of genius is, love of the truth.

Johann von Goethe

The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.

Robertson Davies