Quotes About Genius

how the ability to make connections across disciplines—arts and sciences, humanities and technology—is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.

The thing that Von Neumann had, which I've noticed that other geniuses have, is the ability to pick out, in a particular problem, the one crucial thing that's important.

It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.

Thus he became the archetype of the Renaissance Man, an inspiration to all who believe that the "infinite works of nature," as he put it, are woven together in a unity filled with marvelous patterns.2 His ability to combine art and science, made iconic by his drawing of a perfectly proportioned man spread-eagle inside a circle and square, known as Vitruvian Man, made him history's most creative genius.

Okay, it's not easy, but that's why we're no Einstein and he was.

Here is a selection from her portfolio.

A left-hander, Leonardo wrote from right to left on a page

What made Leonardo a genius, what set him apart from people who are merely extraordinarily smart, was creativity, the ability to apply imagination to intellect. His facility for combining observation with fantasy allowed him, like other creative geniuses, to make unexpected leaps that related things seen to things unseen. "Talent hits a target that no one else can hit," wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. "Genius hits a target no one else can see.

forced to realise that Jobs was, for all his visionary genius, deeply flawed, odd and capricious …' Davin O'Dwyer, Irish Times 'This is an authorised but brutally honest account of the life of a legend of our age' Herald Sun 'Isaacson has done an outstanding

the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-

Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson

porque Leonardo da Vinci constituye el paradigma del principal tema de mis anteriores biografías: que la capacidad de establecer conexiones entre diferentes disciplinas —artes y ciencias, humanidades y tecnología— es la clave de la innovación, de la imaginación y del genio.

When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.

By exalting the interplay between art and science, Leonardo wove an argument that was integral to understanding his genius: that true creativity involves the ability to combine observation with imagination, thereby blurring the border between reality and fantasy. A great painter depicts both, he said.

Einstein would not, as it turned out, ever win a Nobel for his work on relativity and gravitation, nor for anything other than the photoelectric effect.

Sometimes the difference between geniuses and jerks hinges on whether their ideas turn out to be right.

As he approached his thirtieth birthday, Leonardo had established his genius but had remarkably little to show for it publicly. His only known artistic accomplishments were some brilliant but peripheral contributions to two Verrocchio paintings, a couple of devotional Madonnas that were hard to distinguish from others being produced in the workshop, a portrait of a young woman that he had not delivered, and two unfinished would-be masterpieces.

Steve Jobs, Al Alcorn

In collecting such a medley of ideas, Leonardo was following a practice that had become popular in Renaissance Italy of keeping a commonplace and sketch book, known as a zibaldone. But in their content, Leonardo's were like nothing the world had ever, or has ever, seen. His notebooks have been rightly called "the most astonishing testament to the powers of human observation and imagination ever set down on paper."3

Walter Isaacson

Because a lot of people think they're crazy, but in that craziness we see genius.

the ability to make connections across disciplines—arts and sciences, humanities and technology—is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.

Other than a little training in commercial math at what was known as an "abacus school," Leonardo was mainly self-taught. He often seemed defensive about being an "unlettered man," as he dubbed himself with some irony. But he also took pride that his lack of formal schooling led him to be a disciple of experience and experiment.