Quotes About Genius

I think if we push the analysis to its ultimate point we have to say that each earthly father accuses us of our impotence if we become truly creative personalities; they remind us that we are born of men and not gods. No living person can give genius the powers it needs to shoulder the meaning of the world.

He knew everything when he started. The others can't ever learn what he was born with.

Genius is a gift we are given; mastery is the stewardship of our gifts.

It's one thing to kill someone and not leave evidence or hide the body so it's never found, but to be able to murder someone and have everyone think it was an accident of nature? That's some kind of genius.

brilliance is a kind of binary thing. You either got it or you don't. If you do, a 130 IQ and a 170 aren't that different, so long as you know how to apply what you got.

A completed mediocre idea is infinitely better than an unfinished stroke of genius.

The men who have changed the world never succeeded by winning over the powerful, but always by stirring the masses. The first method is a resort to intrigue and only brings limited results. The latter is the course of genius and changes the face of the world.' Napoleon on St Helena

Los hombres que han cambiado el mundo nunca han triunfado por ganarse a los poderosos, sino por agitar a las masas. El primer método es fruto de las intrigas, y solo ofrece un resultado limitado. El segundo es el recorrido del genio, y cambia el rostro del mundo. Napoleón en Santa Helena

It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or do in a circumstance unexpected by other people: it is reflection, meditation.

As Albert Einstein said: "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.

Some people are born with a brain that has this weird, magical mathematical thing that makes them an amazing jazz musician.

This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.

She should remember what Flaubert said - 'Le génie, c'est travailler tous les jours!

Most people in the Western world grow up with the received wisdom that Mozart was a genius. But few people necessarily know why. More than anyone else, he captured this something which is the human condition, the fine line that we all constantly dance between joy and pain, between absolute happiness and absolute heartbreak.

'Wet Hot American Summer' was sort of lowbrow genius, you know? But smart in its cultish silliness. It wasn't considered something of great cultural caliber. But like many cult pieces, it sort of became something culturally relevant, which I think is what's so wonderful about it.

Busquets has been a great player for Spain and Barcelona, don't get me wrong. He's a very effective player and is the first pick for every manager because he plays such a simple game. But we laud him as a genius, whereas our own we don't, we criticise.

It is high time we found out about this man Cummings. Let us give him every opportunity to show us at once whether he is a genius, a charlatan, or a congenital defective - and get him off our minds.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.

Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat, as James Brown and Prince can, has my eternal respect. Prince, who is a genius of the highest order, can come back up while singing and playing the guitar.

The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention.