quotations about genius
Genius has oftenest been the pariah of his time, the unhoused god whom none cared for, unnamed till they whom he first promoted, enriched and honored, found it honorable to own their benefactor.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
The truth is that, to every genius there is a characteristic weakness, a defect to which it naturally leans, and into which, in those inevitable moments when inspiration flags, it is apt to subside.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
What the world needs is more geniuses with humility. There are so few of us left.
OSCAR LEVANT
The Educator's Book of Quotes
GENIUS, like a planet, takes a wide circuit through the pure expanse of nature, and visits not regions only, but whole worlds, which SENSE does not know to exist.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims
Great intellects are skeptical.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The Antichrist
Gods have bestowed our genius on us;
They will also find its use some day.
LI BAI
"An Exhortation"
Genius is talent set on fire by courage.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"Courage,", Counsels by the Way
There is nothing so certain as that those who are the most alert in discovering the faults of a work of genius, are the least touched with its beauties.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Young Archimedes and Other Stories
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius, the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein
Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they know more.
HENRY FORD
San Francisco Examiner, Aug. 26, 1928
On the other hand, much of the commonplace, shallow fashionable talk about hereditary genius--I don't mean, of course, the talk of our Darwins and Galtons, but the cheap drawing-room philosophy of easy sciolists who can't understand them--is itself fully as absurd in its own way as the idea that something can come out of nothing. For it is no explanation of the existence of genius to say that it is hereditary. You only put the difficulty one place back. Granting that young Alastor Jones is a budding poet because his father, Percy Bysshe Jones, was a poet before him, why, pray, was Jones the elder a poet at all, to start with? This kind of explanation, in fact, explains nothing; it begins by positing the existence of one original genius, absolutely unaccounted for, and then proceeds blandly to point out that the other geniuses derive their characteristics from him, by virtue of descent, just as all the sons of a peer are born honourables. The elephant supports the earth, and the tortoise supports the elephant, but who, pray, supports the tortoise? If the first chicken came out of an egg, what was the origin of the hen that laid it?
GRANT ALLEN
"The Recipe for Genius", Falling in Love with Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
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.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook E", Aphorisms
Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Crack-Up
There is no off position on the genius switch.
DAVID LETTERMAN
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
Genius must be born, and never can be taught.
JOHN DRYDEN
Epistle to Congreve, 1693
Genius, as we actually know it, is by no means hereditary. The great man is not necessarily the son of a great man or the father of a great man: often enough, he stands quite isolated, a solitary golden link in a chain of baser metal on either side of him. Mr. John Shakespeare woolstapler, of Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, was no doubt an eminently respectable person in his own trade, and he had sufficient intelligence to be mayor of his native town once upon a time: but, so far as is known, none of his literary remains are at all equal to Macbeth or Othello. Parson Newton, of the Parish of Woolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire, may have preached a great many very excellent and convincing discourses, but there is no evidence of any sort that he ever attempted to write the Principia. Per contra the Miss Miltons, good young ladies that they were (though of conflicting memory), do not appear to have differed conspicuously in ability from the other Priscillas and Patiences and Mercies amongst whom their lot was cast; while the Marlboroughs and the Wellingtons do not seem to bud out spontaneously into great commanders in the second generation. True, there are numerous cases such as that of the Herschels, father and son, or the two Scaligers, or the Caracci, or the Pitts, or the Scipios, and a dozen more, where the genius, once developed, has persisted for two or three, or even four lives: but these instances really cast no light at all upon our central problem, which is just this--How does the genius come in the first place to be developed at all from parents in whom individually no particular genius is ultimately to be seen?
GRANT ALLEN
"The Recipe for Genius", Falling in Love with Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Spanish Drama
Genius makes its observations in short hand; talent writes them out at length.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought