148 Genius Quotes To Inspire

In a world brimming with ideas and innovations, inspiration can often be distilled into a few profound words. Our carefully curated list of the top 148 genius quotes is designed to spark motivation, provoke thought, and ignite the creative genius within you. Whether you're seeking wisdom from historical figures, modern-day thinkers, or timeless visionaries, these powerful quotes will provide the insight and inspiration you need to tackle any challenge. Dive in and let the brilliance of these words elevate your perspective and fuel your journey toward greatness.

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

2. “Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.” - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

3. “Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.” - Woody Guthrie

4. “WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.” - Julian Barnes

5. “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” - E.F. Schumacher

6. “These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.” - Abigail Adams

7. “When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."[Thoughts on Various Subjects]” - Jonathan Swift

8. “Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

9. “The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.” - Bruce Feirstein

10. “Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain.” - Margaret Atwood

11. “The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so thatwithout the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.” - Pearl S. Buck

12. “The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.” - Oscar Wilde

13. “Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

14. “In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.” - Baruch de Spinoza

15. “The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.” - Edgar Allan Poe

16. “Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.” - Orson Welles

17. “Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.” - Claude Monet

18. “There's a thin line between genius and bottom-barrel stupidness. I hover delicately on a tightrope between the two, wondering where I'll land if I'll ever fall.” - Suzanne Crowley

19. “Geniuses have the shortest biographies.” - Claire Messud

20. “My genius is in my nostrils.” - Friederich Nietzsche

21. “Genie währt länger als Schönheit.” - Oscar Wilde

22. “An Widerständen zeigt sich das Genie des Generals, Glück verhüllt es.” - Horace

23. “We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.” - David Mamet

24. “Intelligence, Kant reminds, is not so much a result of genius, rather it is a consequence of a determination to use it.” - Michael R. LeGault

25. “There is no such thing as an evil genius, as evil in it's self is stupidity.” - David Farland

26. “Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.” - Arthur Rimbaud

27. “Madness is the acme of intelligence.” - Naguib Mahfouz

28. “That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making.” - Walter de la Mare

29. “Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not.” - Stephen Vizinczey

30. “There are three reasons why men of genius have long hair. One is, that they forget it is growing. The second is, that they like it. The third is, that it comes cheaper; they wear it long for the same reason they wear their hats long.” - Israel Zangwill

31. “These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.” - Abigail Adams

32. “The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.” - George Bernard Shaw

33. “In my opinion, if, as the result of certain combinations, Kepler's or Newton's discoveries could become known to people in no other way than by sacrificing the lives of one, or ten, or a hundred or more people who were hindering the discovery, or standing as an obstacle in its path, then Newton would have the right, and it would even be his duty... to remove those ten or a hundred people, in order to make his discoveries known to mankind. It by no means follows from this, incidentally, that Newton should have the right to kill anyone he pleases, whomever happens along, or to steal from the market every day. Further, I recall developing in my article the idea that all... well, let's say, the lawgivers and founders of mankind, starting from the most ancient and going on to the Lycurguses, the Solons, the Muhammads, the Napoleons, and so forth, that all of them to a man were criminals, from the fact alone that in giving a new law, they thereby violated the old one, held sacred by society and passed down from their fathers, and they certainly did not stop at shedding blood either, if it happened that blood (sometimes quite innocent and shed valiantly for the ancient law) could help them.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

34. “Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

35. “A genius. A criminal mastermind. A millionaire. And he is only twelve years old.” - Eoin Colfer

36. “People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.” - Stephen Hawking

37. “Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.” - Richard Buckminster Fuller

38. “I knew it was coming. I knew they didn't have the nerve.Three days in and they've got faces like vexed tomatoes, their skins flaking sci-fi style: burnt to fuck. They were an embarrassment; not only to me and the wife and The Fall fans but to their own generation.” - Mark E. Smith

39. “I think MacGregor might be a genius. Anyone so oblivious to the horror of the human world must be.” - Susan Juby

40. “Anyone can put paint on a canvas, but only a true master can bring the painting to life. Anyone can kill, but only a genius can make murder an art.” - Shaun Jeffrey

41. “Fashion is ephemeral, dangerous and unfair.” - Karl Lagerfeld

42. “I would like to be a one-man multinational fashion phenomenon.” - Karl Lagerfeld

43. “I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.” - Albert Camus

44. “Geniusz to brak przystosowania.” - Vladimir Nabokov

45. “No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.” - Aristotle

46. “To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius.” - Joyce Cary

47. “this was business.” - Eoin Colfer

48. “The turmoil and dislocations confronting present-day society will not be solved until both the scientific and religious genius of the human race are fully utilized.” - Baha'i International Community

49. “A genius is someone who takes a complex thing and makes it look simple. An academic does the opposite.” - Robert Fanney

50. “Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius."The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up.But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word” - Brenda Ueland

51. “It is easy to be clever if you leave something important out.” - Peter Redgrove

52. “My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.” - Diane Setterfield

53. “If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius. ” - Michelangelo Buonarroti

54. “If there were a master of stupidity in this world, I would really love to listen to his success story.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

55. “Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.” - William Saroyan

56. “The more obscure our tastes, the greater the proof of our genius.” - Jennifer Donnelly

57. “But why would they do that? What is to be asked? He was a man who sees into things -- very ordinary things. A hat left on the floor of a café in Kingstown, a proverb overheard, an old fisherman mending a net: these, for him, were a kind of incitement. There are no answers other than that. He was not like the rest of us. Not even like himself. His imagination, or soul, or whatever province of his mind was hungry for the sustaining rain of the world, would soak in the storms of his own haunted strangeness, and the berries would bloom, and they were what they were, and if the tendrils were peculiar, and some of them wild, the fruits were so shockingly luscious and potent that the thirsty were willing to savour the bitter for the sake of the concomitant sweet. He needed the very ordinary. He was a beautiful man. What more than this need be said? The sort of man who makes you think the movement of foliage might be causing the breeze.” - Joseph O'Connor

58. “How many stopped-up men and women does it take to produce one Einstein? Ten? A thousand? A hundred thousand? ... So this is what Einstein meant when he looked me in the eye that day and said, I would be nothing without you. It was not success he saw written in my face. He saw, rather, that I would never accomplish anything at all.” - Rana Dasgupta

59. “Poetry destroyed? Genius banished? No! Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought. No; they not only live, but reign, and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell--the hell of your own meanness.” - Charlotte Brontë

60. “Never underestimate spite as a motivator for genius.” - Sam Kean

61. “All geniuses die young.” - Groucho Marx

62. “Genius is the true mystery, and at its edge--the abyss.” - Guillermo Del Toro

63. “People like me are aware of their so-called genius at ten, eight, nine. . . . I always wondered, ``Why has nobody discovered me?'' In school, didn't they see that I'm cleverer than anybody in this school? That the teachers are stupid, too? That all they had was information that I didn't need? I got fuckin' lost in being at high school. I used to say to me auntie ``You throw my fuckin' poetry out, and you'll regret it when I'm famous, '' and she threw the bastard stuff out. I never forgave her for not treating me like a fuckin' genius or whatever I was, when I was a child. It was obvious to me. Why didn't they put me in art school? Why didn't they train me? Why would they keep forcing me to be a fuckin' cowboy like the rest of them? I was different I was always different. Why didn't anybody notice me? A couple of teachers would notice me, encourage me to be something or other, to draw or to paint - express myself. But most of the time they were trying to beat me into being a fuckin' dentist or a teacher” - John Lennon

64. “Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.” - An Wang

65. “There is no off position on the genius button.” - CBS Inc. CBS News.

66. “Genius thinks out of box when leader adjusts the size of box.” - Toba Beta

67. “For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective.” - Robert Musil

68. “Kindness is strength. Good-nature is often mistaken for virtue, and good health sometimes passes for genius. Anger blows out the lamp of the mind. In the examination of a great and important question, every one should be serene, slow-pulsed, and calm. Intelligence is not the foundation of arrogance. Insolence is not logic. Epithets are the arguments of malice.” - Robert Green Ingersoll

69. “It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes,” [T.S. Eliot] wrote, “who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.” - Ross Wetzsteon

70. “Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.” - Oscar Wilde

71. “Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to be the same thing. They both have a tendency to blur the lines of what we call norms, or established reality. They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures.-- from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius” - Author-Poet Aberjhani

72. “Genius is neither learned nor acquired. It is knowing without experience. It is risking without fear of failure. It is perception without touch. It is understanding without research. It is certainty without proof. It is ability without practice. It is invention without limitations. It is imagination without boundaries. It is creativity without constraints. It is...extraordinary intelligence!” - Patricia Polacco

73. “Genius inspires resentment. A sad fact of life.” - Eoin Colfer

74. “Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest.” - Mike Norton

75. “It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women.” - Louisa May Alcott

76. “…because talent isn't genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing.” - Louisa May Alcott

77. “[...] with the protecting sky in all its splendour and the golden sun blazing forth against a backdrop of crystalline blue, to use the inspired words of a television reporter[...].” - José Saramago

78. “I quite agree with Dr. Nordau's assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr. Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots.” - Oscar Wilde

79. “You are vain and wicked- as a genius should be.” - Günter Grass

80. “Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.” - Fulton J. Sheen

81. “Music resembles poetry, in eachAre nameless graces which no methods teach,And which a master hand alone can reach.” - Alexander Pope

82. “Color me....BRILLIANT.” - Jamie Weise

83. “This man has talent, that man geniusAnd here's the strange and cruel difference:Talent gives pence and his reward is gold,Genius gives gold and gets no more than pence.” - William Henry Davies

84. “I am incapable of mediocrity.” - Serge Gainsbourg

85. “Find out what people want to do, then tell them to do it. They'll think you're a genius.” - Connie Brockway

86. “The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius - a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in in general circulation. "A genius working alone," he says, "is invariably ignored as a lunatic."The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find; a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. "A person like this working alone," says Slazinger, "can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shaped should be."The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. "He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting," says Slazinger. "Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.” - Kurt Vonnegut

87. “Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride as if it were our home, which it is. Why then should we take less pride when reading a book written by some long-dead author? Is it not our book just as much, or even more so, than theirs? So the landowner says, ‘Look at my beautiful home! Isn’t it fine?’ And not, ‘Look at the home so-and-so has built.’ Thus we shouldn’t cry, ‘Look what so-and-so has written. What a genius so-and-so is!’ But rather, ‘Look at what I have read! Am I not a genius? Have I not invented these pages? The walls of this universe, did I not build? The souls of these characters, did I not weave?” - Roman Payne

88. “The first ingredient to being wrong is to claim that you are right. Geniuses have a knack for raising new questions. Hence by the public they are either admired for their creativity or, even more commonly so, detested for disturbing the daily peace of mind.” - Criss Jami

89. “An exceedingly confident student would in theory make a terrible student. Why would he take school seriously when he feels that he can outwit his teachers?” - Criss Jami

90. “Emotion is always multiplied in the art of a person who doesn't really show much emotion. It once expanded deep within his hidden soul, and following the downplay his audience is blown away.” - Criss Jami

91. “Persistence. Perfection. Patience. Power. Prioritize your passion. It keeps you sane.” - Criss Jami

92. “The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.” - B.F. Skinner

93. “What is a genius? A person who demands little to nothing from others, but is often found extremely difficult to have around.” - Criss Jami

94. “Vivid simplicity is the articulation, the nature of genius. Wisdom is greater than intelligence; intelligence is greater than philosobabble.” - Criss Jami

95. “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.” - Charles Baudelaire

96. “If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.” - Richard Feynman

97. “The purpose of having the orphans study all these diverse fields was not for them to just become geniuses, but to become polymaths – meaning they would be geniuses in a wide variety of fields.” - James Morcan, Lance Morcan

98. “True genius without heart is a thing of nought - for not great understanding alone, not intelligence alone, nor both together, make genius. Love! Love! Love! that is the soul of genius.” - Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin

99. “Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.” - John Stuart Mill

100. “I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.” - Anais Nin

101. “Si percibo en otra persona nada más que lo superficial, percibo principalmente las diferencias, lo que nos separa. Si penetro hasta el núcleo, percibo nuestra identidad, el hecho de nuestra hermandad.” - Erich Fromm

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

103. “The role of genius is not to complicate the simple, but to simplify the complicated.” - Criss Jami

104. “Genius is finding the invisible link between things.” - Vladimir Nabokov

105. “Perform your task and I shall know you. Perform your task and your genius shall befriend the more.” - Ogwo David Emenike

106. “Genius tries to conquer the world with art, with songs, with words; stupid tries to conquer it with sword, with guns, with arrows!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

107. “What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

108. “If it's true what is said, that only the wise discover the wise, then it must also be true that the lone wolf symbolizes either the biggest fool on the planet or the biggest Einstein on the planet.” - Criss Jami

109. “Henry held up his taco- formerly Vlad's- and grinned. " Little known fact, gentlemen. Tacos are the food of genius."pg248 Henry to Vlad & Joss” - Heather Brewer

110. “A true genius is my brother, for his ability to measure and adapt his imagination to knowledge is unbounded. He can turn laziness into tactics. He can drop tactics for strategy without anyone or anything realizing it. He can comprehend grand principles of creation effortlessly and flawlessly. His capacity for knowledge surpasses even my own, and it's not because he constantly takes steps forward. It's because he has unconsciously taught himself to understand the principles behind possibility and nothingness. That is a true genius.” - Lionel Suggs

111. “I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.” - Criss Jami

112. “The only genius that's worth anything is the genius for hard work.” - Kathleen Winsor

113. “But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.” - Marcel Proust

114. “Geniuses are those who have the intelligence, enthusiasm, and endurance to acquire the needed expertise in a broadly valued domain of achievement and who then make contributions to that field that are considered by peers to be both original and highly exemplary.” - Dean Keith Simonton

115. “I've proved my point. I've demonstrated there's no difference between me and everyone else! All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day. You had a bad day once, am I right? I know I am. I can tell. You had a bad day and everything changed. Why else would you dress up as a flying rat? You had a bad day, and it drove you as crazy as everybody else... Only you won't admit it! You have to keep pretending that life makes sense, that there's some point to all this struggling! God you make me want to puke. I mean, what is it with you? What made you what you are? Girlfriend killed by the mob, maybe? Brother carved up by some mugger? Something like that, I bet. Something like that... Something like that happened to me, you know. I... I'm not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! Ha ha ha! But my point is... My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was, I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can't you? I mean, you're not unintelligent! You must see the reality of the situation. Do you know how many times we've come close to world war three over a flock of geese on a computer screen? Do you know what triggered the last world war? An argument over how many telegraph poles Germany owed its war debt creditors! Telegraph poles! Ha ha ha ha HA! It's all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for... it's all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can't you see the funny side? Why aren't you laughing?” - Alan Moore

116. “A lack of illusion is golden, and it is quite possible that creativity is the highest form of intelligence. One might further develop oneself in the creative sense and, therefore, at times, find some degree of shame more so than pride when having always followed that of the safe and ever-praised academia.” - Criss Jami

117. “Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.” - Terry Pratchett

118. “Il genio è un africano che vede in sogno la neve.” - Vladimir Nabokov

119. “Equality has no place for genius.” - Allen Bloom

120. “Some people today are wandering generalities instead of meaningful specifics because they have failed to discover and mine the wealth of potentials in them.” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

121. “Intelligence entails a strong mind, but genius entails a heart of a lion in tune with a strong mind.” - Criss Jami

122. “We can never be entirely original, as artists or as people. The genius and vision of those who came before us is too great for us to digress from entirely. Though, as creatures that are compelled to test and surpass our own creative abilities, we must always strive for that originality in everything we do in order to move the world forward.” - Jessica Lave

123. “The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore "the giant agony of the world" and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity.” - Helen Waddell

124. “I refuse to settle for what you call reality.” - Solange nicole

125. “That’s the problem with any ‘simple truth’—it always takes a gaggle of complete idiots or a team of all-knowing geniuses to miss it.” - Ali Sheikh

126. “I went to some classes. Vampire was in the Hair of Magical Magic Creatures. He looked all depressed because Draco had disappeared and he had used to be in love with Draco. He was sucking some blood from a Hufflepuff.” - Tara Gilesbie

127. “The twin aspects of genius, the passive and the active, are possessed by the fully realized artist; they also form the necessary equipment of the Adept. Yet in very few people are these twin aspects manifested. Nearly everyone has a capacity for the passive aspect, which involves some sort of appreciation of aesthetic values. There are few people totally unresponsive to the beauties of nature, and none at all that is not responsive to its ferocious manifestations.Fewer are able to respond profoundly to the beauty of natural phenomena, and fewer still to so-called works of art. It takes a degree of genius to respond to such manifestations the whole time. Artists in this category are among the saints, some of whom thrilled with rapture at the constant awareness of the total unity, harmony, and beauty of things.Such were Boehme, Ramakrishna, etc. Some yogis are immersed in an unsullied and vibrant bliss derived from the incessant contemplation of this 'world-bewitching maya'4-the breath-taking wonder of the great and glamorous illusion which surrounds us.On the other side of the fence, on the side of active or creative genius, there are yet fewer. Active or creative genius means nothing less than the ability to translate the wonder or the terror of the great lfla (the great play of life) in terms of visual, tactile, audible, olfactory, or some other sensual presentation of phenomena.But there is a third aspect of genius which is yet more rare. It is the ability to open the door of the theatre and admit the influences from outside, from the swarming gulfs beyond the grasp of the mind, and accessible only to the magical entity whose fantastic feelers can snare the most fugitive impulses as they flash through the holes in space, the kinks in time, to be reflected in the magic mirror of the artist's mind.” - Kenneth Grant

128. “Real geniuses would like that what we think of ourselves is true.” - Dejan Stojanovic

129. “Developing your unique thought to the level of being appreciated and adopted by the world - that's genius.” - Ogwo David Emenike

130. “A man's genius seems to befriend the more when he reads with open heart, the masterpiece of masterminds, the sagacity of sages, and the ingenious words of geniuses of ages.” - Ogwo David Emenike

131. “With genius, as with beauty -- all, well almost all, is forgiven.” - Susan Sontag

132. “Being innovative is to allow yourself to expose your mind to something great that has potential to change lives and the world positively and you take action on it.” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

133. “There is no gap as wide as the one between mediocrity and genius.” - Rutvik Oza

134. “Even if there are instances in which it can be mistook by onlookers, never fool yourself into using misunderstood genius as an excuse to be a fool.” - Criss Jami

135. “Constant effort and frequent mistakes are the stepping stones to genius.” - Elbert Hubbard

136. “If it weren't for acid, you might not have an IPod, and you definitely would not have some of the best music in your IPod.” - Bill Maher

137. “...why do people venerate Einstein or Bill Gates? Clive Bell explains: Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age....” - John Geddes

138. “What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. 'Librarian' - that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between 'libido' and 'licentious' - it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books. - p.113” - Miles Harvey

139. “The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

140. “She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind.” - Andrea Dworkin

141. “It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12,13,14, and 15) which over fifty years, created and expanded the the audience of listeners to the quartets of Beethoven, thus achieving, as all masterpieces do, progress if not in the quality of artists, at least in the company of minds, which is largely composed these days of what was missing when the work appeared: people capable of liking it.” - Marcel Proust

142. “Philosophy is to the mind of the architect as eyesight to his steps. The Term 'genius' when applied to him simply means a man who understands what others only know about. A poet, artist or architect, necessarily 'understands' in this sense and is likely, if not careful, to have the term 'genius' applied to him; in which case he will no longer be thought human, trustworthy or companionable. Whatever may be his medium of expression he utters truth with manifest beauty of thought. If he is an architect, his building is natural. In him, philosophy and genius live by each other, but the combination is subject to popular suspicion and appellation 'genius' likely to settle him--so far as the public is concerned.” - Frank Lloyd Wright

143. “Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day.” - Samuel Goldwyn

144. “He challenged the world with his genius, and the world defeated him by ignoring the challenge and starving him. He stopped writing because he had failed and because he had no choice but to accept the world’s terms: there is no mystery here. This was not insanity, but common sense.” - Raymond Weaver

145. “If you can be kind to people, you will be a genius in this world.” - Bryant McGill

146. “You have a genius for bringing trouble upon yourself” - Georgette Heyer

147. “There have only been two geniuses in the world — Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.” - Tallulah Bankhead

148. “At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.” - Aberjhani