Genius Man Quotes & Sayings

Science has grown frightfully audacious in these days
swift-footed, ponderous, careering over her iron ways with unslacking pace. This rampant dragon, on which I am mounted, see how he bends his once stiff neck to his rider, champing his checked bit and pawing the dust, impatient to leap around the globe. Genius is prescient, foresees its own might. Man is striving through these iron-ribbed, steam-sped hippogriffs, to recover his lost ubiquity and omnipotence, and threatens soon to grasp in his ample palm, and fix with flaming eye-ball, the elemental forces! — Amos Bronson Alcott

In Jung's terms-that we noted previously-the work is the artist's own transference projection, and he knows that consciously and critically. Whatever he does he is stuck with himself, can't get securely outside and beyond himself. He is also stuck with the work of art itself. Like any material achievement it is visible, earthly, impermanent. No matter how great it is, it still pales in some ways next to the transcending majesty of nature; and so it is ambiguous, hardly a solid immortality symbol. In his greatest genius man is still mocked. No matter that historically art and psychosis have had such an intimate relationship, that the road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. The artist and the madman are trapped by their own fabrications; they wallow in their own anality, in their protest that they really are something special in creation. — Ernest Becker

It is not every man who can be a Christian, even in a very moderate sense, whatever education you give him. It is a matter of constitution and temperament, after all. He may have to be born again many times. I have known many a man who pretended to be a Christian, in whom it was ridiculous, for he had no genius for it. It is not every man who can be a free man, even. — Henry David Thoreau

It is not perhaps a question of truthfulness; it is rather a natural incapacity to think for herself, to take cognizance of herself in her own brain, and not in the eyes and in the lips of others; even when the ingenuously write into little secret diaries, women think of the unknown god reading
perhaps
over their shoulders. With a similar nature, a woman, to be placed in the first ranks of men, would require even higher genius than that of the highest man; that is why, if the conspicuous works of men themselves, the finest works of women are always inferior to the worth of the women who produced them. — Remy De Gourmont

At thirteen, Noboru was convinced of his own genius (each of the others in the gang felt the same way) and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions; that death took root at the moment of birth and man's only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it; that propagation was a fiction; consequently, society was a fiction too: that fathers and teachers, by virtue of being fathers and teachers, were guilty of a grievous sin. Therefore, his own father's death, when he was eight, had been a happy incident, something to be proud of. — Yukio Mishima

The more distinctly a man knows, the more intelligent he is, the more pain he has; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all. — Arthur Schopenhauer

After making a mistake or suffering a misfortune, the man of genius always gets back on his feet. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Genius is the union of man and God in the acts of the soul. Great men are always greater than their deeds. They are in connection with a reserve power that is without limit. — Wallace D. Wattles

What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man!-To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity; to be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries! — Thomas B. Macaulay

I was painfully shy when I was younger but at some point you've gotta grow up. I think the genius in the man-boy thing is you tap into a woman's motherly instincts. — Bill Burr

It is true there is nothing displays a genius, I mean a quickness of genius, more than a dispute; as two diamonds, encountering, contribute to each other's luster. But perhaps the odds is much against the man of taste in this particular. — William Shenstone

A man who possesses genius is insufferable unless he also possesses at least two other things: gratitude and cleanliness. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Textbook intelligence is not true intelligence. It only marks a man good at memorization. — Suzy Kassem

Remember that only when past genius is transmitted into a present power shall we meet the first truly american poet. And somewhere, born to the streets rather than the athenaeum, we will come upon the first true reader. The spirit of the american is suspected to be timid, imitative, tame
the scholar decent, indolent, complaisant. The mind of our country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. Without action, the scholar is not yet man. Ideas must work through the bones and arms of good men or they are no better than dreams. — Matthew Pearl

If it were not for respect for human opinions, I would not open my window to see the Bay of Naples for the first time, whilst I would go five hundred leagues to talk with a man of genius whom I had not seen. — Madame De Stael

The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up. — Victor Hugo

No enemy is so terrible as a man of genius. — Benjamin Disraeli

All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the romantic novel, but with Jane Austen, what we have is Mills & Boon written by a genius. — P.D. James

A man who is a genius and doesn't know it, probably isn't. — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light. — George Steiner

The man of genius whether as artist or thinker requires a mass of accidental variations to select from and a rigidly selective process of attention. — Boris Sidis

A man of talent will strive for money and reputation; but the spring that moves genius to the production of its works is not as easy to name — Arthur Schopenhauer

No one suffers so much as he [the genius] with the people, and, therefore, for the people, with whom he lives. For, in a certain sense, it is certainly only "by suffering" that a man knows. If compassion is not itself clear, abstractly conceivable or visibly symbolic knowledge, it is, at any rate, the strongest impulse for the acquisition of knowledge. It is only by suffering that the genius understands men. And the genius suffers most because he suffers with and in each and all; but he suffers most through his understanding ... — Otto Weininger

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Each man's soul is his genius. — Xenocrates

We have too long treated the natural world as an adversary rather than as a life-sustaining gift from the Almighty. If man has the genius to build, which he has, he must also have the ability and the responsibility to preserve. — Gerald R. Ford

Yet Poe was a drunkard, and Coleridge an addict, and Byron a rake, and Verlaine a degenerate. You have to separate the man from the thing. The genius has to pay a ransom for his genius in the instability of his temperament. A great medium is even more sensitive than a genius. Many are beautiful in their lives. Some are not. The excuse for them is great. They practise a most exhausting profession and stimulants are needed. Then they lose control. But their physical mediumship carries on all the same. — Arthur Conan Doyle

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. — James Joyce

You are not a woman. You may try-but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. — George Eliot

Maugham's success, in fact, lies a good deal less in what he positively does than in what he discreetly leaves undone. He gets the colors of life into his Charles Strickland, not by playing a powerful beam of light upon him, but by leaving him a bit out of focus
by constantly insisting, in the midst of every discussion of him, upon his pervasive mystery
in brief, by craftily making him appear, not as a commonplace, simple and completely understandable man, but as the half comprehended enigma that every genuine man of genius seems to all of us when we meet him in real life. — H.L. Mencken

It is true that the genius of assembled men or of peoples is quite different from a man's character in private, and that one would know the human heart very imperfectly if he did not examine it also in the multitude. But it is no less true that one must begin by studying man in order to judge men, and that he who knew each individual's inclinations perfectly could foresee all their effects when combined in the body of the people. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

All the bourgeois virtues, caution, obedience, zeal and thoughtfulness- they all melt away powerless in the fire of the great fateful moment that always demands only genius and forms it into a a lasting image. Contemptuously it repulses the timid man; it, another god of the earth, with fiery arms, lifts only the bold into the heaven of heroes. — Stefan Zweig

With the use of a map, I could walk from Paris to Calcutta; without a map, I might find myself in Odessa. Well, if we had a similar 'map' of the human mind, a man could explore all the territory that lies between death and mystical vision, between catatonia and genius. — Colin Wilson

The consistent and persistent man of average intelligence is more likely to succeed than an erratic and lazy genius. — Om Swami

Dear God, I prayed, all unafraid (as we're inclined to do), I do not need a handsome man but let him be like You; I do not need one big and strong nor yet so very tall, nor need he be some genius, or wealthy, Lord, at all; but let his head be high, dear God, and let his eye be clear, his shoulders straight, whate'er his state, whate'er his earthly sphere; and let his face have character, a ruggedness if soul, and let his whole life show, dear God, a singleness of goal; then when he comes (as he will come) with quiet eyes aglow, I'll understand that he's the man I prayed for long ago. — Ruth Graham

When a man of genius appears in the world, it is immediately recognized by the fact that all the blockheads join forces against him. — Jonathan Swift

If you're a man and you ask questions, you're a genius; if you're a woman, you're difficult. — Martine McCutcheon

A man who has the inventive genius can't control it exactly as he wishes. Its working depends in great measure on inspiration
on a momentary suggestion
and it is almost impossible to tell beforehand at what moment it will come. — Henrik Ibsen

Every man is a potential genius until he does something. — Herbert Beerbohm Tree

I'm interested in genius the way a hungry man is interested in Philadelphia cheesesteaks. I want something. I want a piece of it. — Eric Weiner

I wish I didn't want the exotic man who knows the entire history of jazz, and instead wanted the teacher, who has his flaws but whose kindness is as rare as genius. — Merritt Tierce

When the government designates as punishable all play of mind against the state, the moderate liberals come and opine that fun, satire, wit, humor, etc., must have free play anyhow, and genius must enjoy freedom. So not the individual man indeed, but still genius, is to be free. Here the state, or in its name the government, says with perfect right: He who is not for me is against me. — Max Stirner

It is impossible for a dove to catch a swallow, for a clever man to catch a genius. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

It is of the greatest important in this world that a man should know himself, and the measure of his own strength and means; and he who knows that he has not a genius for fighting must learn how to govern by the arts of peace. — Niccolo Machiavelli

A man cannot wheedle nor overawe his Genius. It requires to be conciliated by nobler conduct than the world demands or can appreciate. — Henry David Thoreau

Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Why is this painful journey so indispensable to the acquisition of true wisdom? ... It is as if the mind were a squeamish organ that refused to entertain difficult truths unless encouraged to do so by difficult events. "Happiness is good for the body," Proust tells us, "but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind." These griefs put us through a form of mental gymnastics which we would have avoided in happier times. Indeed, if a genuine priority is the development of our mental capacities, the implication is that we would be better off being unhappy than content, better off pursuing tormented love affairs than reading Plato or Spinoza. (Proust writes) A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and more vital than does a man of genius who interests us. — Alain De Botton

You have a curious way of arousing one's imagination, stimulating all one's nerves, and making one's pulses beat faster. You put an aureole on vice, provided only if it is honest. Your ideal is a daring courtesan of genius. Oh, you are the kind of man who will corrupt a woman to her very last fiber. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

It is no more natural and no less conventional to shout in anger or to kiss in love than to call a table 'a table'. Feelings and passional conduct are invented like words. Even those which like paternity seem to be part and parcel of the human make-up are in reality institutions. It is impossible to superimpose on man a lower layer of behavior which one chooses to call 'natural' followed by a manufactured cultural or spiritual world. Everything is both manufactured and natural in man as it were in the sense that there is not a word, not a form of behavior which does not owe something to purely biological being and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of animal life and cause forms of vital behavior to deviate from their pre-ordained direction through a sort of leakage and through a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

I would like to be a one-man multinational fashion phenomenon. — Karl Lagerfeld

Education is a companion which no misfortune can depress, no crime can destroy, no enemy can alienate, no despotism can enslave. At home, a friend, abroad, an introduction, in solitude a solace and in society an ornament. It chastens vice, it guides virtue, it gives at once grace and government to genius. Without it, what is man? A splendid slave, a reasoning savage. — Joseph Addison

It's a total big difference between a person that got lyrics and a person that can make hit singles. I'm a person that can make some hit singles. I'm not in no booth trying to be a lyrical genius. I'm preparing to make me some singles, and as I develop as a man, then they'll respect my emcee skills. — Waka Flocka Flame

There is a genius in every man and woman, waiting to be brought forth. — Wallace D. Wattles

A man may be a great statesman, and yet dislike his wife, and like somebody else's. A man may be a great hero, and yet he may have an unseemly passion, or an unpaid tailor. But the British public does not understand this ... It thinks, unhappily or happily as you may choose to consider, that genius should keep the whole ten commandments. Now, genius is conspicuous for breaking them. — Ouida

A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark. — Chaim Potok

The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate bondage, and the meanest and most servile preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principle put themselves forward as the apostles of civilization and intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where all things are out of their natural connections, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true? — Alexis De Tocqueville

Man who invented the hamburger was smart; man who invented the cheeseburger was a genius. — Matthew McConaughey

There was not a sous-cusinier in Rouen, who could not have told you that Bon-Bon was a man of genius. His very cat knew it, and forebore to whisk her tail in the presence of the man of genius. — Edgar Allan Poe

It is the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle and to bind the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us from itself. True geniuswill not impoverish, but will liberate, and add new sense. If a wise man should appear in our village, he would create, in those who conversed with him, a new consciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes to unobserved advantages; he would establish a sense of immovable equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be cheated; as every one would discern the checks and guarantees of condition. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren't the gods monsters? Isn't a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster! — Octave Mirbeau

The romantic hero is also "fatal" because, to the extent that he increases in power and genius, the power of evil increases in him. Every manifestation of power, every excess, is thus covered by this "It is so." That the artist, particularly the poet, should be demoniac is a very ancient idea, which is formulated provocatively in the work of the romantics. At this period there is even an imperialism of evil, whose aim is to annex everything, even the most orthodox geniuses. "What made Milton write with constraint," Blake observes, "when he spoke of angels and of God, and with audacity when he spoke of demons and of hell, is that he was a real poet and on the side of the demons, without knowing it." The poet, the genius, man himself in his most exalted image, therefore cry out simultaneously with Satan: "So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, farewell remorse ... Evil, be thou my good." It is the cry of outraged innocence. — Albert Camus

It is the curse of the genius that in the same measure in which others think him great and worthy of admiration, he thinks them small and miserable creatures. His whole life long he has to suppress this opinion; and, as a rule, they suppress theirs as well. Meanwhile, he is condemned to live in a bleak world, where he meets no equal, as it were an island where there are no inhabitants but monkeys and parrots. Moreover, he is always troubled by the illusion that from a distance a monkey looks like a man. — Arthur Schopenhauer

It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man
that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value. — Oscar Wilde

Man could escape danger only by renouncing adventure, by abandoning that which has given to the human condition its unique character and genius among the rest of living things. — Rene Dubos

A field of clay touched by the genius of man becomes a castle. — Og Mandino

The number of different aspects that the face of a man has assumed may be taken almost as a physiognomical measure of his ... genius. — Otto Weininger

He was a young man of savage & unexpected originality, a diseased genius & quite frankly, a mad genius. Imbeciles grow insane & in their insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or agitated; in the madness of a man of genius some genius often remains: the form & not the quality of intelligence has been affected; the fruit has been bruised in the fall, but has preserved all its perfume & all the savor of its pulp, hardly too ripe. — Remy De Gourmont

A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possesses at least two things besides: gratitude and purity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Any man's greatness is a tribute to the nobility of all mankind, so when we celebrate the genius of [Leo] Tolstoy, we say, "Look! One of our boys made it! Look what we're capable of!" — Mel Brooks

No, I don't admire the genius. But I admire and love the result of the genius's activity in the world, of which the great man is only the poor necessary tool, only, so to speak, the paltry awl to bore with. — Knut Hamsun

It appears to general observation, that revolutions create genius and talents; but those events do no more than bring them forward. There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which, unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition, to the grave. As it is to the advantage of society that the whole of its faculties should be employed, the construction of government ought to be such as to bring forward, by a quiet and regular operation, all that extent of capacity which never fails to appear in revolutions. — Thomas Paine

It always seems to me that one of the saddest things about the death of a literary man is the fact that the breaking-up of his collection of books almost invariably follows; the building up of a good library, the work of a lifetime, has been so much labour lost, so far as future generations are concerned. Talent, yes, and genius too, are displayed not only in writing books but also in buying them, and it is a pity that the ruthless hammer of the auctioneer should render so much energy and skill fruitless. — Stuart Dodgson Collingwood

I have never met the man who had vision large enough to appreciate my genius," he said simply. "Perhaps it was not to be expected. — Georgette Heyer

A judge at common law may be an ordinary man; a good judge of a carpet must be a genius. — Edgar Allan Poe

I always use the Jeff Beck model. Jeff Beck is just a genius, and he keeps getting better ... If there's anybody in your field you want to aspire to be like, it is a guy who does what he wants to do. Every record at least he comes out with one thing that makes everybodys' jaw drop ... I would hope that Jimi Hendrix would have done that, although, man, the odds are against him because he did so much in such a short amount of time ... — Joe Satriani

It was the White Man who spanned the continents of the world with railroads and super highways and electrical power lines. It was the White Man who created the miraculous world of electronics, ushering in the telephone, the radio and television. It was the White Race, who in a combined burst of energy and genius sent rockets to the moon and planted the feet of the White Man on extra-terrestrial territory in the last decade. — Ben Klassen

There is no more dreary or more repulsive creature than the man who has evaded his genius. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Man's real genius and knowledge remains preserved in books — Albert Pike

Napoleon, the man of genius, did this! But to say that he destroyed his army because he wished to, or because he was very stupid, would be as unjust as to say that he had brought his troops to Moscow because he wished to and because he was very clever and a genius — Leo Tolstoy

Don't waste your time trying to look all bad at me. See, I know you, man," Howard said. "School Bus Sam. Mr. Fireman. You go all heroic, but then you disappear. Don't you? It kind of comes and goes with you. Everyone last night is all, 'Where's Sam? Where's Sam?' And I had to say, 'Well, kids, Sam is off with Astrid the Genius because Sam can't be hanging out with regular people like us. Sam has to go off with his hot blond girlfriend.'"
"She's not my girlfriend," Sam said, and instantly regretted it.
Howard laughed, delighted to have provoked him. "See, Sam, you always got to be in your own little world, too good for everyone, while me and Captain Orc and our boys here, we're always going to be around. You step away, and we step up. — Michael Grant

The man of genius, like a dog with a bone, or the slave who has swallowed a diamond, or a patient with the gravel, sits afar and retired, off the road, hangs out no sign of refreshment for man and beast, but says, by all possible hints and signs, I wish to be alone,
good-by,
fare-well. But the Landlord can afford to live without privacy. — Henry David Thoreau

A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us. — Marcel Proust

Only time itself can prove if a man is a genius or is simply insane. — James Morris Robinson

In reality, Hemingway didn't appeal to plumbers or roofers who read books; he was a rich man's writer, with the vocabulary and hunting instinct of the blue-collar workingman. But Hemingway had the unfailing genius of an inventor, and each book he wrote was new, sparkling new, something that hadn't been seen in American prose, something that merged common speech with uncommon clarity, something that verged on poetry. — Gerald Hausman

Only by obedience to his genius; only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise beforea man, and lead him by the hand out of all the wards of the prison. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which we call character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

You know the difference between right and wrong,' he repeated finally. 'Man, why did you need Initiation - by the Golden Dawn, or by anybody else? You are a genius, a sage, a giant among men. You have solved the problem which philosophers have been debating since antiquity - the mystery about which no two nations or tribes have ever agreed, and no two men or women have ever agreed, and no intelligent person has ever agreed totally with himself from one day to the next. You know the difference between right and wrong. I am overawed. I swoon. I figuratively kiss your feet. — Robert Anton Wilson

One of the characters in our story, Gavril Ardalionovitch Ivolgin, belonged to the other category; he belonged to the category of "much cleverer" people; though head to toe he was infected with the desire to be original. But this class of person, as we have observed above, is far less happy than the first. The difficulty is that the intelligent "ordinary" man, even if he does imagine himself at times (and perhaps all his life) a person of genius and originality, nevertheless retains within his heart a little worm of doubt, which sometimes leads the intelligent man in the end to absolute despair. If he does yield in this belief, he is still completely poisoned with inward-driven vanity. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Ismail Merchant was just the most seductive, passionate, outrageous, driven, genius of a man. — Glenn Close

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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!' — Waka Flocka Flame

I do not despise genius-indeed, I wish I had a basketful of it. But yet, after a great deal of experience and observation, I have become convinced that industry is a better horse to ride than genius. It may never carry any man as far as genius has carried individuals, but industry-patient, steady, intelligent industry-will carry thousands into comfort, and even celebrity; and this it does with absolute certainty. — Walter Lippmann

We say that every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. We measure our friends so. We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof we take no heed, but wait the reappearings of the genius, which are sure and beautiful. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

As I rode back to Detroit, a vision of Henry Ford's industrial empire kept passing before my eyes. In my ears, I heard the wonderful symphony which came from his factories where metals were shaped into tools for men's service. It was a new music, waiting for the composer with genius enough to give it communicable form.
I thought of the millions of different men by whose combined labor and thought automobiles were produced, from the miners who dug the iron ore out of the earth to the railroad men and teamsters who brought the finished machines to the consumer, so that man, space, and time might be conquered, and ever-expanding victories be won against death. — Diego Rivera

Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognized the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with the possible exception of being poor - the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery - and even being poor, as Trapnel himself asserted, gave the right to speak categorically when poverty was discussed by people like Evadne Clapham. — Anthony Powell

He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities. — Robertson Davies

Talk about an ideal democracy! In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious power will say: - "This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter." It is more certain than consols, and payment of income is not affected by Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you — Arnold Bennett

The genius of a man capable of explaining religion seems to me to be of a higher order than that of a founder of religion. And that is the glory to which I aspire. — Charles-Francois Dupuis

Yes, I believe sincerely that every man has consummate genius within him. Some appear to have it more than others only because they are aware of it more than others are, and the awareness or unawareness of it is what makes each one of them into masters or holds them down to mediocrity. — Glenn Clark