Quotes About Genius

Great thinking comes from a great mind

Whatever you can do or think you can begin it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Goethe.

You could find these people then, remarkable originals, men and women who thrived on remoteness and kept alive the individuality of human genius.

You knew, you knew the Commandments, had learned them out of the missal-thin pages of the green Catechism, where, in a genius move of utter simplicity God had set the high bar for Christianity by saying Love your neighbor like yourself, and you read that and looked over at your neighbor, Patrick Plunkett picking his nose and pressing the pickings on the underside of your desk, and by virtue of nothing more than carnal reality that bar got that much higher.

It's like there's a mighty reservoir of songs that no one's ever heard up there in heaven and there's a tap in Neil Young's brain that's somehow attached to it. All he has to do is ease his mind into the right gear and something will always come trickling down.

One 'is' a genius only in the sense that one 'is' a syphilitic, in the sense that 'one' is violently problematized by a ferocious exteriority. One returns to the subject of which genius has been predicated to find it charred and devastated beyond recognition.

Help was at hand in the rather large shape of Douglas Adams. As well as being the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas was an Apple Mac genius, guitar enthusiast and – fortunately for us – a fan of Pink Floyd. He could bring a marvellous sense of humour to the most desperate moments. He became party to a lot of the discussions about the album title.

The most repulsive and grotesque spectacle is that of the superiority of a living professor over a dead genius.

Das widerlichste und groteskeste der Schauspiele ist das der Überlegenheit des lebenden Professors über das tote Genie.

The genius who bemoans and laments himself forgets that he has spared himself the misfortune of mediocrity.

said Let's just regard the whole episode as overdetermined and forget it. This worked out to be a genius thing to say, evidently. He was relieved. We held hands across the table.

Drama is not a genre for infant prodigies: I can't think of a dramatist who made a major reputation as early as, say, Keats or Rimbaud in lyric poetry.

Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren't the gods monsters? Isn't a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!

Shatov stared at me and said, 'Old boy, you don't understand. A member of the Politburo who can speak for forty minutes without notes — he must be a genius!

Let school-masters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning; Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.

Both wit and understanding are trifles, without integrity; it is that which gives value to every character. The ignorant peasant without fault is greater than the philosopher with many; for what is genius or courage without an heart?

These last have been the men of science, the great and heaven-born men of science; and they are few. In

Archimedes, one of the greatest men of science there has ever been, and the father of physics.

The man I spoke of as coming two hundred years later is Leonardo da Vinci. True

That Lafayette was a man of genius is a thought that cannot for a moment be entertained.

Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.

It seems, regrettably, that not even genius can overcome the debilitating effects of a mild fever.

There's a scholar, he went on, a creature who earns his bread by footnoting a dead genius or sniping at a living one.