Rules and models destroy genius and art.
William Hazlitt

If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.
William Hazlitt

People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.
William Hazlitt

Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.
William Hazlitt

Dandyism is a variety of genius.
William Hazlitt

Common sense is genius in homespun.
Alfred North Whitehead

Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect idea that they subsequently express with their hands.
Giorgio Vasari

In our own time it has been seen... that simple children, roughly brought up in the wilderness, have begun to draw by themselves, impelled by their own natural genius, instructed solely by the example of these beautiful paintings and sculptures of Nature.
Giorgio Vasari

The modes of expression of men of genius differ as much as their souls, and it is impossible to say that in some among them, drawing and color are better or worse than in others.
Auguste Rodin

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.
Henry B. Adams

Every true genius is bound to be naive.
Friedrich Schiller

To understand Europe, you have to be a genius - or French.
Madeleine Albright

Nietzsche claimed that his genius was in his nostrils and I think that is a very excellent place for it to be.
Federico Fellini

There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.
Tom Wolfe

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.
Christopher Morley

Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.
Edward Gibbon

Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue.
Andre Breton

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.
Heinrich Heine

Who in the same given time can produce more than others has vigor; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius.
Johann Kaspar Lavater

Who makes quick use of the moment is a genius of prudence.
Johann Kaspar Lavater