If there be anything that can be called genius, it consists chiefly in ability to give that attention to a subject which keeps it steadily in the mind, till we have surveyed it accurately on all sides.
It takes application, a fine sense of value, and a powerful community-spirit for a people to have serious leisure, and this has not been the genius of the Americans.
Genius is of no country.
Genius: the superhuman in man.
The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement.
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Talent works, genius creates.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated. Begin, and then the work will be completed.
Genius is eternal patience.
What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.
Genius is childhood recalled at will.
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.
The truth is that our race survived ignorance; it is our scientific genius that will do us in.
It's called 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' by Dave Eggers. It is absolutely everything the title implies. It's the greatest book I've ever.
The media works in sound bites. They can make you look like a genius or stupid.
And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization.
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.
The genius which runs to madness is no longer genius.
I feel genius in great works of art. I have seen medical cures that science can't explain, some seemingly triggered by faith. The same is true of millions of other people.
I never said I was a genius.
Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius.
Jerry Orbach is just phenomenal. He is genius, so present.
It is high time we found out about this man Cummings. Let us give him every opportunity to show us at once whether he is a genius, a charlatan, or a congenital defective - and get him off our minds.
Genius is that in which the soul of a race bums at its brightest, revealing and preserving its vision; works of art are great and significant in proportion to the clarity and fulness with which they incarnate this vision.
Most people in the Western world grow up with the received wisdom that Mozart was a genius. But few people necessarily know why. More than anyone else, he captured this something which is the human condition, the fine line that we all constantly dance between joy and pain, between absolute happiness and absolute heartbreak.
Only a great genius like the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell can be mother, wife and novelist without solitude. I couldn't write until my youngest child went to school, and then I began - the first morning - and I've never stopped.
I just love Stephen Colbert. He's a genius.
It is Proust's implacable honesty, his reluctance to cut corners or to articulate what might have been good enough or credible enough in any other writer that make him the introspective genius he is.
If I wait for the genius to come, it just doesn't arrive.
Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.
Amy Poehler, Amy Sedaris - they're both genius.
The genius of a folk melody or story is not the feeling that it's original but quite the opposite - the feeling that it has existed all along.
The first Matrix genius, the second one, what's up with the dancing? I haven't even seen the third one.
Genius is patience.
I didn't get into rap to be no lyrical genius. I got into rap to feed my family and help the people in need around me, that's it. A lot of people say, 'Man, Waka Flocka ain't go no lyrics,' so I was like, 'Yeah, you right!'
David Fincher is a genius.
