Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.
Thomas Carlyle

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.
Carl Sandburg

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

Intelligence recognizes what has happened. Genius recognizes what will happen.
John Ciardi

Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!
May Sarton

The modes of expression of men of genius differ as much as their souls, and it is impossible to say that in some among them, drawing and color are better or worse than in others.
Auguste Rodin

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Vladimir Nabokov

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Vladimir Nabokov

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Vladimir Nabokov

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

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.
Arthur Rimbaud

Commerce changes the fate and genius of nations.
Thomas Gray

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
Antonin Artaud

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

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.
Henri Bergson

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
Allen Ginsberg

Rising genius always shoots out its rays from among the clouds, but these will gradually roll away and disappear as it ascends to its steady luster.
Washington Irving

I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?
Charles de Lint