Quotes About Genius

Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. The genius is a man who knows everything without having learned it.

It is not because the touch of genius has roused genius to production, but because the admiration of genius has made talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant.

A Fool can become a Genius when he understands he is a Fool but. A Genius can become a Fool when he understands he is a Genius.

If you stick with a vision, it might not all work, but some of it will be absolute genius. To me, 15 minutes worth of absolute genius in a film is so much better than two hours of mediocrity. I would rather pay to see something different like that.

Genius can do much, but even genius falls short of the actuality of a single human life.

Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.

Genius is the power to labor better and more availably. Deserve thy genius: exalt it.

For ages past the Genius of Literature and the Genius of Art have walked together hand in hand. For the Goddess of letters is blind, and only she of Art can lend her sight.

The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.

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

I do not believe, as do so many musicians, that genius should be left to fight its way to the light. Genius is too rare, too precious, to be permitted to waste the best years of life--the years of youth and lofty dreams--in a heart-breaking struggle for bread. To starve the soul with the body is to do worse than murder. Think, too, of what the public loses!

I watched L'eclisse [1962] with Alain Delon and Monica Vitti. Changed my world. What a glamorous and modern film. This is what a genius is - the thing of a genius. The dresses, the tiny heels, the Cardin look, the boys dressed up as Italian gigolos - it was divine, very modern. [Michelangelo] Antonioni, I loved and I realized: how modern.

True genius does not fulfill expectations; true genius shatters it.

A renowned genius once asked a student, "What are you watching when you sit on a hillside in the late afternoon as the colors turn from yellow to orange and red and finally darkness?" He answered, "You are watching the sunset." The genius responded, "That is what is wrong with our age. You know full well you are not watching the sun set. You are watching the world turn."

James Gandolfini was a genius. Anyone who saw him even in the smallest of his performances knows that. He is one of the greatest actors of this or any time... A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes. I remember telling him many times, 'You don't get it. You're like Mozart.'

Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.

the distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and uses; genius combines and creates.

The old idea that some genius pulls all of this stuff out of the air is ridiculous. As Ridley pointed out, the only way Edison could invent the lightbulb is because all the elements had been developed before. That's obvious it wasn't just his genius - 20 others developed it at the same time. And that's true for almost every invention and discovery.

The real problem is that through our scientific genius we’ve made of the world a neighborhood, but through our moral and spiritual genius we’ve failed to make of it a brotherhood.

If we accept that we are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all cultures share the same genius. And whether that genius is placed into technological wizardry which has been our great achievement, or, by contrast, placed into the unraveling of complex threads of memory inherent in a myth is simply a matter of choice.

Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius. When education ends, genius often begins.

We have to have genius creative thoughts precisely four times a year and on exact dates. I actually write them on my calendar. I write, 'Friday, Nov. 8. Three o'clock. Have a genius creative idea.'

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, "How did he do it? He must be a genius!"

THE SUFFERING OF GENIUS AND ITS VALUE. The artistic genius desires to give pleasure, but if his mind is on a very high plane he does not easily find anyone to share his pleasure; he offers entertainment but nobody accepts it. That gives him, in certain circumstances, a comically touching pathos; for he has no right to force pleasure on men. He pipes, but none will dance: can that be tragic?

Preparation is - if not the key to genius - then at least the key to sounding like a genius.

I've never met a genius. A genius to me is someone who does well at something he hates. Anybody can do well at something he loves - it's just a question of finding the subject.

genius accepts genius unconditionally

The proportion of genius to the vulgar is like one to a million.

The definition of genius, really, should be that that person can do what the rest of us have to learn how to do.

Inspiration and genius -one and the same.

An average person with average talents and ambition and average education, can outstrip the most brilliant genius in our society, if that person has clear, focused goals.

American mainstream is obsessed with black creative genius - be it music, walk, style - but at the same time puts a low priority on the black social misery which is the very context out of which that creativity flows.

Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars...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.

Mediocrity has no greater consolation than in the thought that genius is not immortal.

Film maker Andi Olsen has a wonderful short film called Where the Smiling Ends. She waited at the Trevi Fountain in Rome and filmed the tourists only at the moment after their photos had been snapped, the moment their smiles dissolved. It's genius and heartbreaking. I think about her film when I explore the places the strips malls meet the wild world they are eating up.

Everyone is a genius after the fight.

What makes success is not your genius idea, but the execution and follow-through around it

Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate; debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most.

A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark.

What is a genius? What is a living legend? What is a megastar? Michael Jackson -- that's all. And when you think you know him, he gives you more. I think he is one of the finest people to hit this planet, and, in my estimation, he is the true King of Pop, Rock and Soul.

…because talent isn't genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

Beauty and art pervade all the business of life like a kindly genius, brightly adorning our surroundings whether interior or exterior, mitigating the seriousness of existence and the complexities of the real life, extinguishing idleness in an entertaining fashion, and, where there is nothing good to be achieved, filling the place of vice better than vice itself.

I didn't abandon my studies. Because I was, through no - clarify this. Through no particular genius of my own, I was the first person from Libertyville Public High School to attend Harvard, not because I was smarter than anyone or better than anyone, but no one had ever applied before. It was like University of Illinois, a fine institution, was the sort of the upper echelon of places where kids went from that school. And so I felt sort of a duty to myself and my peers to continue with those studies, and to continue to, intellectually arm myself for my coming struggles.

Genius of AND. Embrace both extremes on a number of dimensions at the same time. Instead of choosing a OR B, figure out how to have A AND B-purpose AND profit, continuity AND change, freedom AND responsibility, etc.

What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?

Any media-brainwashed automaton can summon the insipid courage to peer into the horrifying abyss. But it takes a freaking genius with a fearless imagination to peer into the maw of happiness.