Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.
R. Buckminster Fuller

Genius always gives its best at first; prudence, at last.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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

The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.
Francis Bacon

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.
Victor Hugo

Taste is the common sense of genius.
Victor Hugo

The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
Victor Hugo

Genius: the superhuman in man.
Victor Hugo

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
Victor Hugo

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

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.
Alexander Pope

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.
Alexander Pope

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
Gore Vidal

Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.
Gore Vidal

Since when was genius found respectable?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The lucky person passes for a genius.
Euripides

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.
Joseph Addison

If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.
Joseph Addison