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

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.
Edmond de Goncourt

Genius is nothing but continued attention.
Claude Adrien Helvetius

Those who have wrought great changes in the world never succeeded by gaining over chiefs; but always by exciting the multitude. The first is the resource of intrigue and produces only secondary results, the second is the resort of genius and transforms the universe.
Martin Van Buren

Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

I have learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.
Leo Burnett

Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience.
Paul Cezanne

It is always well to get near to men of genius.
William Henry Moody