You don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t pushed. Nobody knows. I did it the way I did it, and it worked. Above all, it worked.

If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.

An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.

The fine line between genius and madness is a punch line. Duck, you idiot!

Before you can tame your genius spirit, you have to find her.

A genuine leader leads by examples only and listens to all but trusts only what he experiences himself than believing even the trusted ones.

{Comment to Delambre on chemist Antoine Lavoisier’s execution during the French Revolution}Only a moment to cut off that head and a hundred years may not give us another like it.

The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.

My heart goes out to some of those rather hostile yet highly intelligent individuals who may see problems really because they have solutions. That hostility is learned in defense; not offense. An often stubborn and...

There’s no reason to not be humble, because as great as you may be, you can always be greater.

Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, or is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent.

A few lessons learned as a teacher: I’ve learned that if you whisper, children will listen…a scribble can be anything (I mean anything!) a monster, a cat, a mom, a dad–our job is to ask...

Geniuses don’t become geniuses until they find the right moron to compare themselves to.

To understand Europe, you have to be a genius – or French.

Chemical stimulation blunted the edge of Edna’s otherwise so carefully cherished genius

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

When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let’s make damn sure we’re the ones alive at the end.

A genius does what he masters. An ordinary man tries to master what he does.

This man has talent, that man geniusAnd here’s the strange and cruel difference:Talent gives pence and his reward is gold,Genius gives gold and gets no more than pence.

Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Enmerson’s interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a...

Kindness is strength. Good-nature is often mistaken for virtue, and good health sometimes passes for genius. Anger blows out the lamp of the mind. In the examination of a great and important question, every one...

Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness...

I have yet to see a genius or a hero who, if stuck with a burning match, would feel less pain than his undistinguished average brother.

I do not need drugs to be a genius, do not take a genius to be human, but I need your smile to be happy.

What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.

An intelligent consistency is the foundation of genius.

The first ingredient to being wrong is to claim that you are right. Geniuses have a knack for raising new questions. Hence by the public they are either admired for their creativity or, even more...

Being innovative is to allow yourself to expose your mind to something great that has potential to change lives and the world positively and you take action on it.

Love is like a river flowing through your heart. I’ll bring the boat, if you bring the bridge.

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,...

If people fully understand you, they will think of you as a normal, if they half understand you, will think of you as a genius, and when they can’t understand, will certainly think of you...

Rocket shipsare excitingbut so are roseson a birthday.

Intelligence, Kant reminds, is not so much a result of genius, rather it is a consequence of a determination to use it.

The marquis stared at Richard, openly amused. “What a refreshing mind you have, young man,” he said. “There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?

…bow to genius, but to the authority of that genius – not the display of talent…

Sometimes the hardest thing about committing the perfect crime can be keeping your genius to yourself.

There is no gap as wide as the one between mediocrity and genius.

In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.

Genius is finding the invisible link between things.

The lucky person passes for a genius

Franklin was a thin, pink person who was either a genius or, well, not one. Chances weren’t.

During the first half of the present century we had an Alexander von Humboldt, who was able to scan the scientific knowledge of his time in its details, and to bring it within one vast...

Genius inspires resentment. A sad fact of life.

If you’re not a smart worker, it’s about how hard you work double the amount from the heart; if you’re not a hard worker, it’s about how smart you work but times two from the...

I mean, Tarantino is such a SHMUCK 90 percent of the time. But ten percent of the time, I’ve seen genius shining off the guy.

Thor once took an IQ test, and he was scoring so high that the referees took away his ability to shoot three pointers.

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud...

Madness, genius, originality – it’s all the same thing; it’s a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one.