Quotes About Genius

The germ of genius with a definite purpose is contagious. Otherwise, it's pathogenic.

You have the mark of a genius. You're highly intelligent. Also lazy. You don't make any effort to do work that doesn't appeal to you. But once something engages your interest, you apply yourself wholeheartedly to solving that problem. The trouble is that you rarely find an objective that seems worthy of your attention. In this postwar mess of a country, I would guess that you're having a hard time finding a practical application for your genius

Women! What can you say? Who made 'em? God must have been a fuckin' genius. The hair... They say the hair is everything, you know. Have you ever buried your nose in a mountain of curls... just wanted to go to sleep forever? Or lips... and when they touched, yours were like... that first swallow of wine... after you just crossed the desert.

It's a funny thing. When you're tired, general cognitive ability drops. There's scientific evidence to back that up, no question. Because you're slacking off, some other part of your brain—the base, the lizard, the id, whatever you want to call it—tries to compensate. Eighty-five percent brain-dead, fifteen-percent instinctive genius.

With my own pupils now I always try to remember the value of encouragement. Sometimes a callow youth appears who may be a fool or may be a genius and I would rather be guilty of encouraging a fool than of discouraging a genius.

America's genius lay in three things that are rather more subtle than invention: making innovations more user friendly; producing companies that can commercialize these innovations; and developing techniques for running these companies successfully.

I wouldn't use the word 'scared' for my role as Hitchcock, but it was my most insecure. Taking on such a formidable, giant personality such as Hitchcock; he was one of the great geniuses of world cinema. Sheer genius.

Peter Sellers was just a brilliant actor, and also comedic.

Jerry Orbach is just phenomenal. He is genius, so present.

As an actor, I really like Philip Seymour Hoffman. I think he's a genius.

A photographic memory, to me, is kind of like brainiac, genius type. I don't think I have that.

I don't buy into the phrase 'comedy genius.' It's like football; you can have the talent, but 90 per cent is hard work, the other ten per cent is trying to make it all look as natural as possible.

A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.

Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.

Lady Gaga is the Picasso of the entertainment world. She's very intelligent.

When you see the best of the best - when you see a Matisse or a Picasso - what interests you is the creativity and harmony.

'Le Reve' may be one of the three best pictures Pablo Picasso ever painted.

I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.

I look at people like Picasso and Da Vinci and Escher and Miles Davis, and they'll write or paint that one definitive masterpiece of maybe 50 that they have that's really trying to go outside the box, trying to do something that's tough. And then when you accomplish it, you look back and go, 'Yeeaaaah - masterpiece.'

It took me six years to get close to Picasso. I learnt a lot from him, and he was an absolute genius. He almost became my grandfather at the time. It was like he was a magician or something.

'Midnight Cowboy' is an exquisite piece of filmmaking. It's insane.

Well, I don't know any piece by heart, but Mozart goes something like this... What do you think?

I think there have to be Bachs and Beethovens. We may have - there are so many more people. Musical training is available to so many more, but it may be that we've hit a right wall in terms of accessible styles and since we demand innovation as a criterion of genius, there may not be more innovative styles to be found.

When you hear the party that glorified Occupy Wall Street blast success; when you hear them minimize the genius of the men and women who make jobs out of nothing, is that what you teach your children about work?