Quotes About Genius

Genius is never understood in its own time.

With or without the title, Bobby Fischer was unquestionably the greatest player of his time

I'm a Beethoven freak. I listen to him all the time.

Genius cannot escape the taint of its time more than a child the influence of its begetting.

Who in the same given time can produce more than others has vigor; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius.

The stakes are immense, the task colossal, the time is short. But we may hope - we must hope - that man's own creation, man's own genius, will not destroy him.

Art is the supreme communicator of diverse cultures and ideas in a common frame of understanding, a virtual bridge across time. It is also the universal link into genius.

Contemporary criticism only represents the amount of ignorance genius has to contend with. . . . Time will reverse the judgement of the vulgar.

John Lennon was brilliant, so gifted, so giving. He was the Bach, Beethoven, the Rachmaninoff of our time.

Lack of genius never held anyone back. Only time wasted on resentment and daydreaming can do that.

It is difficult to be funny and great at the same time. Aristophanes and Moliere and Mark Twain must sit below Aristotle and Bossuet and Emerson.

Besides the bore condescending, who, whether good-natured or ill-natured, is a most provoking animal—there is the bore facetious, an insufferable creature, always laughing, but with whom you can never laugh. And there is another exotic variety—the vive la bagatelle bore of the ape kind—who imitate men of genius. Having early been taught that there is nothing more delightful than the unbending of a great mind, they set about continually to unbend the bow in company.

I need you to get inside Wayne's head. I need someone who thinks a bit left field and in your own unpleasant way, Helen Walsh, you're a genius. He had a point. I'm lazy and illogical. I've limited people skills. I'm easily bored and easily irritated. But I have moments of brilliance. They come and they go and I can't depend on them but they do happen.

There, wealth is a god, and the greed of gain a virtue. There, genius starves, and heroism dies unrewarded. There, faith is martyred, and unbelief elected sovereign monarch of the people. There, the sublime, unreachable mysteries of the Universe are haggled over by poor finite minds who cannot call their lives their own. There, nation wars against nation, creed against creed, soul against soul. Alas, fated planet! how soon shalt thou be extinct, and thy place shall know thee no more!

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.

There is a genius for impoverishment always at work in the world. And it has its way, as if its proceedings were not only necessary but even sensible. Its rationale, its battle cry, is Competition

Indeed, the genius of Abel and Galois could be compared only to a supernova-an exploding star that for a short while outshines all the billions of stars in its host galaxy.

Like many business men of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient.

The genius of the Spanish writer has always flourished through excessive rhetoric, which expresses a fundamental element in our nature and in our culture. If you think of our great writers, all of them are great rhetoricians. Think of Pablo Neruda, for instance, a great poet. It is the exuberance, the excess. Creation is something that appears like a natural phenomena, a kind of transpiration of nature more than an intellectual exercise.

El genio artístico o literario, no es en ningún caso garantía de lucidez política.

What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off.

Look at Picasso. O'Neill. Tennessee Williams. Capote. Were these shiny happy people spreading sunshine? No. Only the greatest of personal demons can force you to do powerful work.

It is an old remark, that all arts and sciences have a mutual dependence upon each other... Thus men, very different in genius and pursuits, become mutually subservient to each other; and a very useful kind of commerce is established by which the old arts are improved, and new ones daily invented.