Quotes About Genius

There is no genius in life like the genius of energy and activity.

Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius.

If there is anything that can be called genius, it consists chiefly in the ability to give that attention to a subject which keeps it steadily in the mind, till we have surveyed it accurately on all sides.

Being stuck is a position few of us like. We want something new but cannot let go of the old-old ideas, beliefs, habits, even thoughts. We are out of contact with our own genius. Sometimes we know we are stuck; sometimes we don't. In both cases we have to do something.

You can't have genius without patience.

Genius is eternal patience.

He is . . . like many other geniuses, a greater friend to the bottle, than the bottle is to him.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.

Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm; it moves stones, it charms brutes. Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity and truth accomplishes no victories without it.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Doing easily what others find is difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.

It takes immense genius to represent, simply and sincerely, what we see in front of us.

Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

We define genius as the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.

Before I was a genius I was a drudge.

Genius develops in quiet places, character out in the full current of human life.

Men of genius are the worst possible models for men of talent.

There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.

The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.