Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.

No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.

The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.

The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.

Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find it everywhere.

If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me... by newspapers and the Bible.

People of small caliber are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding.

There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few.

Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.

Nothing is sadder than having worldly standards without worldly means.

It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans.

The Boston people were willing to learn but only if one recognized how much they knew already.

How delightful is the company of generous people who overlook trifles and keep their minds instinctively fixed on whatever is good and positive in the world around them.

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.