quotations about genius
Don't be a genius, my son, it isn't good for anybody.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Beloved Vagabond
If you are a genius and unsuccessful, everybody treats you as if you were a genius, but when you come to be successful, when you commence to earn money, when you are really successful, then your family and everybody no longer treats you like a genius, they treat you like a man who has become successful.
PABLO PICASSO
quoted in Gertrude Stein's Picasso
There is nothing in the life before us comparable in interest to the tragic, gradual cracking of the great mind; the overtasking of the great capital, and the ensuing failure; the spectacle of heaving genius breaking in the contact with misfortune.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Genius discovers a system; average talent stereotypes it till it is shattered by fresh genius.
SRI AUROBINDO
Thoughts and Aphorisms
Genius without Education is like Silver in the Mine.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1750
The public will only stand genius in infintesimal doses, sprinkled with mannerisms and fashionable literature.... A fashionable genius! Doesn't that make you laugh?... What a waste of power.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
Jean-Christophe
Look down upon Genius and he will rise to a giant; attempt to crush him, and he will often soar to a god.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
MOZART
entry in souvenir album, April 11, 1787
In the professional and upper classes there is a freedom and play of faculty everywhere going on, which in the chances of intermarriage between lawyer-folk and doctor-folk, scientific people and artistic people, county families and bishops or law lords, and so forth ad infinitum, offers by far the best opportunities of any for the occasional development of that rare product of the highest humanity, the genuine genius.
GRANT ALLEN
"The Recipe for Genius", Falling in Love with Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
Genius requires an audience.
JACQUELINE CAREY
Kushiel's Dart
Genius, without work, is certainly a dumb oracle, and it is unquestionably true that the men of the highest genius have invariably been found to be amongst the most plodding, hard-working, and intent men -- their chief characteristic apparently consisting simply in their power of laboring more intensely and effectively than others.
SAMUEL SMILES
Self-Help
There is no character more frequently given to a writer than that of being a genius. I have heard many a little sonneteer called a fine genius. There is not a heroic scribbler in the nation that has not his admirers who think him a great genius; and as for your smatterers in tragedy, there is scarce a man among them who is not cried up by one or other for a prodigious genius.
JOSEPH ADDISON
"Genius", Essays and Tales
Genius is of no country.
CHARLES CHURCHILL
The Rosciad
I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.
JENNY OFFILL
Dept. of Speculation
The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Maxims for Revolutionists
Genius is the accumulated wealth of our humanity--its most intense development concentrated at one point, and then with clearer expression and with mysterious power shot back to us across the galvanic lines of thought and feeling.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Maybe that was what genius was: the knack of seeing the obvious through its obscure curtain of irrelevancies.
K. J. PARKER
Devices and Desires