Top 630 Genius Quotes

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift
Adlai Stevenson has a genius for saying the right thing, at the right time, to the wrong people.
Joe E. Lewis
Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed. I am glad to believe that the majority of persons do find their right vocation.
P. T. Barnum
A lot of writers dream of feature films, but television – by way of TNT, CBS, Lifetime, and Hallmark Hall of Fame – has always called my name. And after seeing ‘True Detective,’ can there be any doubt that the storytelling on TV is as genius as it gets?
Luanne Rice
I think David Hewlett is a comedic genius. I think he’s great.
Brian J. Smith
Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius.
Isaac D’Israeli
As Fallingwater demonstrates, Wright’s genius was always specific, but also always lively, always daring.
Jane Smiley
There is great work to be done, and the women will lead us. So I say, Astonish us with your genius. Inspire us with your creation. Work with one another. Endure the tribulations.
Caterina Fake
Who makes quick use of the moment is a genius of prudence.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
I don’t think I’m a genius. Not yet.
Savion Glover
I’d describe ‘Psych’ as ‘Real Genius’ meets ‘Django Unchained.’
James Roday
The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It’s our great contribution to the arts.
Ken Burns
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
Thomas Carlyle
What does genius mean? God has put us here specifically

What does genius mean? God has put us here specifically… every person has a job or journey to do. It’s just a matter of finding what we’re here to fulfill or execute. That’s genius to me.
Savion Glover
Every man is a potential genius until he does something.
Herbert Beerbohm Tree
Genius is never understood in its own time.
Bill Watterson
I mean, you’re gonna be left behind if you don’t appreciate the genius that is Meredith Vieira.
Mo Rocca
She was a genius, my mother.
Sally Kirkland
The so-called ‘materialistic conception of history,’ with the crude elements of genius of the early form which appeared, for instance, in the ‘Communist Manifesto,’ still prevails only in the minds of laymen and dilettantes.
Max Weber
When the audience reacts all together, it’s genius. The audience is its own being in a way. It’s a weird, amorphous beast that is also somehow a golden emperor that is also somehow every adult you’ve ever come across in your life who doesn’t approve of you – all in one place.
Baron Vaughn
Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.
Marilyn Monroe
Which is why, in my lieder concerts, I always strove, when possible, to sing only the works of a single composer, so that the audience could be gradually drawn into a particular creative genius’ way of thinking, and could follow him.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
Sana Takeda is a genius. It’s really that simple. Her vision and sense of story and beauty is beyond compare. I loved working with her on ‘X-23.’ I knew, though, that she could do much more beyond the constraints of a traditional superhero story.
Marjorie Liu
Martin Lawrence is one of my comedic heroes, and he’s a genius.
Tracy Morgan
I think Stephen Sondheim is a – and I hardly ever use this word – but this is as close as it gets to a genius.
Christoph Waltz
Fullscreen is doing some really interesting work. They are taking these YouTube stars and people who have made entire careers out of social media and bringing them into an even bigger limelight on a new entrepreneur platform – and that’s fascinating! That’s genius to me.
Madeline Brewer
Nina Simone is a musical genius and a rich and precious treasure who paid a heavy price for her artistic freedom.
Dianne Reeves
Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.
R. Buckminster Fuller
There’s pressure to come up with something genius every time. I feel like I keep letting myself down with my Twitter posts. I have to start keeping a journal of rough drafts of prophetic ideas about the world.
Ari Graynor
My wife determined that my genius should prevail, and that my final success as an ornithologist should be triumphant.
John James Audubon
By and large, talent is in such short supply that mediocrity can be taken for brilliance rather more than genius can go undiscovered.
Charles Saatchi
The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not confined by repetition.
Theodor W. Adorno
I sleep till one, and I’m always surprised when someone in blue rinse on a talk show says, ‘You’re a genius, Mr. Newley, you do so many things.’ Tony Newley never realized his potential, did the things he should have done.
Anthony Newley
Even though Da Vinci was a genius, it’s important to remember he was just a man.
Tom Riley
We live in a world in which courage is in less supply than genius.
Peter Thiel
I was induced to establish several orders of merit, from conviction that emulation, well directed, becomes a useful servant; and, that the latent genius of some youth is more easily brought into action this way, than by the more sordid gratification of self-interest.
Joseph Lancaster
When I was in grade five or six, I just remember quite a lot of people were always talking about me like I was some kind of math genius. And there were just so many moments when I realized, like, okay, why can’t I just be like some normal person and go have a 75% average like everyone else.
Vitalik Buterin
I’ve made money, and I’ve been ripped off. I’ve had creative freedom, and I’ve been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will.
David Byrne
Artists and scientists both think outside the box. They’ve got to come with genius experiments or ideas to expose the most interesting phenomena.
Cornelia Parker
I’m a musical genius.
Timbaland
Remember when those CD-ROMs from AOL came in the mail almost every day? The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg.
Douglas Rushkoff
One thing I’ve been doing at Baidu is running a workshop on the strategy of innovation. The idea is that innovation is not these random unpredictable acts of genius but that, instead, one can be very systematic in creating things that have never been created before.
Andrew Ng
I think the core of fans’ relationship is one that vacillates schizophrenically and mercurially from reverence to resentment. Fans fetishize the players’ athletic genius and both deify it and demonize it; witness the way awe turns into anger whenever a player holds out or flips off the offensive coordinator.
David Shields
I’m no genius, sure, but I’m no dum-dum.
Sandra Dee
Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always pres

Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.
Denis Diderot
When the sacredness of one’s word is matched in the attributes of his character throughout, all that constitutes a man, then we find that there is something in a man’s life greater than his occupation or his achievements; grander than acquisition or wealth; higher than genius; more enduring than fame.
Orison Swett Marden
I believe ‘Sonchiriya’ is a film that will be recalled with much pride and respect for many years from now. We all worked very hard to make it a special work, and the director Abhishek Sir is a genius.
Bhumi Pednekar
I don’t know what ‘genius’ even means. It’s just a matter of keeping your eye on the ball.
Lindsey Buckingham
Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.
Franz Grillparzer
There’s a line between being egotistical and being genius or great.
Lecrae
Ronald Reagan knew audiences. It was a key element of his political genius. One of the things at which brilliant politicians are better than mediocre ones is smelling new public concerns over the horizon before they are picked up by polls – before the public even knows to call them ‘issues’ at all.
Rick Perlstein
My husband wrote me love letters while I was on location in Canada and pregnant. They turned into being about food, and it turned it into a cookbook. He called it ‘The Tuscan Cookbook for the Pregnant Male.’ It was kind of genius. When I took it a book agent, he was like, ‘Men don’t buy cookbooks.’
Debi Mazar
The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
Walter Lippmann
One of the big surprises for me about Einstein was… that he wasn’t this big introvert; he was more like a novelist or a painter. It’s amazing how close society came to not benefiting from Albert Einstein’s genius.
Ron Howard
I am a writer… I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.
Sylvia Plath
If you think about it, Jesus was this religious genius who grows up on the Silk Road, and so He’s getting from the West all these Greek ideas from Plato about body and soul.
Jay Parini
Like many businessmen of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient. And so he simply set about achieving that efficient monopoly.
Mario Puzo
Art has a double visage: it looks before and after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; economizes the energy of genius.
George Edward Woodberry
All this is rather pretentious and fey to even talk about, but Flannery O’Connor sat down to write stories. The rest of us, some of us, don’t have that kind of wit and genius. We don’t do that. We sit down and have some accidents.
Padgett Powell
Instead of being lionized and admired for her genius, instead of being able to earn a decent living as a writer, Andrea Dworkin was misrepresented and demonized.
Catharine MacKinnon