Neatness begets order; but from order to taste there is the same difference as from taste to genius, or from love to friendship.
Johann Kaspar Lavater

He who seldom speaks, and with one calm well-timed word can strike dumb the loquacious, is a genius or a hero.
Johann Kaspar Lavater

Genius must be born, and never can be taught.
John Dryden

Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought, but genius must be born; and never can be taught.
John Dryden

It seldom happens that a premature shoot of genius ever arrives at maturity.
Marcus Fabius Quintilian

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
Thomas B. Macaulay

Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
Joseph Joubert

Genius is not perfected, it is deepened. It does not so much interpret the world as fertilize itself with it.
Andre Malraux

I like the idea of taking a true classic written by a true genius and destroying it essentially! I like the idea of bringing it down to earth a bit - and even a bit lower than that.
Randy Newman

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
Oscar Levant

There is nothing in the genius of America more precious today than the spirit of religious and political tolerance in its application to our own people.
Paul Harris

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.
Oliver Goldsmith

I make no claim to being a business genius. You can make so much money in this business that it loses its value.
Nat King Cole

Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.
Robertson Davies

Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
Lawrence Durrell

The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.
Andrea Dworkin

The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.
Sid Caesar

Genius is of no country.
Charles Churchill

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

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.
Georg C. Lichtenberg