To see things in the seed, that is genius.
Lao Tzu

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Oscar Wilde

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
Oscar Wilde

Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.
Oscar Wilde

The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
Edgar Allan Poe

Genius is sorrow's child.
John Adams

Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day.
Samuel Goldwyn

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.
Leonardo da Vinci

The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.
Walt Whitman

There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.
Walt Whitman

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift

God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be. Follow always that great law. Let the sky and God be our limit and Eternity our measurement.
Marcus Garvey

Being stuck is a position few of us like. We want something new but cannot let go of the old - old ideas, beliefs, habits, even thoughts. We are out of contact with our own genius. Sometimes we know we are stuck; sometimes we don't. In both cases we have to DO something.
Rush Limbaugh

The capacity of the female mind for studies of the highest order cannot be doubted, having been sufficiently illustrated by its works of genius, of erudition, and of science.
James Madison

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Thomas A. Edison

His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.
Thomas A. Edison

Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.
Marcus Aurelius

I've never met a genius. A genius to me is someone who does well at something he hates. Anybody can do well at something he loves - it's just a question of finding the subject.
Clint Eastwood

The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe