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

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.
George Eliot

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.
George Eliot

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

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Gertrude Stein

Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.
Charlie Chaplin

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Genius - to know without having learned; to draw just conclusions from unknown premises; to discern the soul of things.
Ambrose Bierce

Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
Henri Frederic Amiel

To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.
Henri Frederic Amiel

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.
Virginia Woolf

Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
Aldous Huxley

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

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character had abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and courage which it contained.
John Stuart Mill

The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
John Stuart Mill