Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.

Clinton's fakery was so deft and deeply ingrained that it was impossible to tell where it ended and the real Bill Clinton began. This constituted a kind of political genius.

Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.

I make no claim to being a business genius. You can make so much money in this business that it loses its value.

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Doorman - a genius who can open the door of your car with one hand, help you in with the other, and still have one left for the tip.

Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

Churchill was one of the few men I have met who even in the flesh give me the impression of genius. George Bernard Shaw is another. It is amusing to know that each thinks the other is overrated.

The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away.

The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a grip on our eyeballs and eardrums, which in turn can be marketed to advertisers.

Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.

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

Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.

God gives talent. Work transforms talent into genius.

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.

The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Commerce changes the fate and genius of nations.

I am the farthest thing from a computer genius.

Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought, but genius must be born; and never can be taught.

I was induced to establish several orders of merit, from conviction that emulation, well directed, becomes a useful servant; and, that the latent genius of some youth is more easily brought into action this way, than by the more sordid gratification of self-interest.

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.

People hate me because I am a multifaceted, talented, wealthy, internationally famous genius.

Every positive value has its price in negative terms... the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!

All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly.

Like many businessmen of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient. And so he simply set about achieving that efficient monopoly.

Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as "Soho" poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought.

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.