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Quotes about genius

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I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.
John F. Kennedy1917–1963Address at a White House dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners (29 April 1962), quoted in The White House Diary, at the JFK Library
- Knowledge
What the age needs is not a genius — it has had geniuses enough, but a martyr, who in order to teach men to obey would himself be obedient unto death. What the age needs is awakening.
Søren Kierkegaard1813–1855The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s (20 November 1847)
There is a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
Oscar Levant1906–1972
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865The Lyceum Address (1838)
There are very few really brilliant men who have not had at least one madman among their ancestors.
André Maurois1885–1967Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble) (1918), Ch. 12
Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.
Herman Melville1819–1891Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850)
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Vladimir Nabokov1899–1977Strong Opinions (1973), Foreword
- Talking
- Writing
Freud was, after all, a genius. You can tell that because people still hate him.
Jordan Petersonborn 196212 Rules for Life (2017), p. 243
Genius is personality with two measures of talent.
Pablo Picasso1881–1973
Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
Ezra Pound1885–1972Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), Ch. 23
That books do not take the place of experience, and that learning is no substitute for genius, are two kindred phenomena; their common ground is that the abstract can never take the place of the perceptive.
Arthur Schopenhauer1788–1860The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, ch. 7 (trans. E. F. J. Payne), p. 74
- Experience
Every child is in a way a genius; and every genius is in a way a child.
Arthur Schopenhauer1788–1860The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, ch. 31 (“On Genius”)
- Children
It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize one’s uncles.
George Bernard Shaw1856–1950
Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.
Fulton J. Sheen1895–1979
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift1667–1745Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)