Quotations on Genius

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

~ Benjamin Franklin

Genius is the ability to act rightly without precedent - the power to do the right thing the first time.

~ Elbert Hubbard

Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede - not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen.

~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

No great genius is without an admixture of madness.

~ Aristotle

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the privilege of genius that to it life never grows commonplace as to the rest of us.

~ James Russell Lowell

Genius develops in quiet places, character out in the full current of human life.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I don't want to be a genius - I have enough problems just trying to be a man.

~ Albert Camus

When a true genius appears in this world you may know him by the sign that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

~ Jonathan Swift

Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought,
But Genius must be born; and never can be taught.

~ John Dryden

Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.

~ Thomas A. Edison

Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can.

~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton