Genius Quotes - Page 18

There's a genius part of you that wants to create. That part of you wants to talk to God. Get out of the way.

We don't train executives, we find them. If a mountain stands up like Everest, you don't have to be a genius to figure out that it's a high mountain.

Any complex activity, if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament. If they are outstanding and reveal themselves in exceptional achievements, their possessor is called a 'genius'.

The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade. Every single person out there is an idiot, but collectively they're a genius.

It's not like you get up on stage and you're immediately a genius. It takes a long time. So, don't be discouraged.

a masterpiece doesn't so much transcend its time as perpetuate it; it keeps its moment alive.

Only a great fool or a great genius is likely to flout all social grace with impunity, and neither one, doing so, makes the most comfortable companion.

Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.

In my profession it isn’t a question of telling good literature from bad. Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money — it’s always been like that. What do I, an agent, get out of a literary genius who won’t be discovered for another hundred years? I’ll be dead myself then. Successful incompetents are what I need.

Consolation for those moments when you can't tell whether you're the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

Some people have a perfect genius for doing nothing, and doing it assiduously.

The persecution of genius fosters its influence.

Talent imitates, genius steals.

If people are saying you’re wrong that’s probably a good sign that you’re a genius.

If the birth of a genius resembles that of an idiot, the end of a Havana Corona resembles that of a 5-cent cigar.

Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.

We may be sure that a genius like Mozart, were he born today, would write concertos like Chopin and not like Mozart.

I have never been able to see how a thirty-year old moron can vote more wisely than a fifteen-year old genius.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Silence is the genius of fools and one of the virtues of the wise.

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

The great genius does not let his work be determined by the concrete finite conditions that surround him, whilst it is from these that the work of the statesman takes its direction and its termination. ... It is the genius in reality and not the other who is the creator of history, for it is only the genius who is outside and unconditioned by history.

The great man of science, unless he is also a philosopher, ... deserves the title of genius as little as the man of action.

A great composition to me is.. an incarnation of a genius, of all that was ever in him of the slightest consequence.

Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness.