"There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."
— Oscar Levant

"I'm a misunderstood genius."
"What's misunderstood?"
"Nobody thinks I'm a genius."
— Bill Watterson

"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

"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped."
— Elbert Hubbard

"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

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
— Albert Einstein

""A genius is someone who takes a complex thing and makes it look simple. An academic does the opposite.""
— Robert Fanney

"Madness is the acme of intelligence.
"
— Naguib Mahfouz

"We are all geniuses up to the age of ten."
— Aldous Huxley

"It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing."
— Gertrude Stein

"No great genius is without an admixture of madness."
— Aristotle

"E=mc2"
— Albert Einstein (The Theory of Relativity: & Other Essays)

"My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed."
— Allen Ginsberg

"Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment."
— Claude Monet

"Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple."
— Woody Guthrie

"There is no such thing as an evil genius, as evil in it's self is stupidity."
— David Farland (Ravenspell: The Wizard of Ooze)

"Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together."
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain."
— Margaret Atwood (The Robber Bride)

"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

"There are two ways to live your life. Either as if nothing is a miracle or as if everything is"
— Albert Einstein

"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 (The Very Ordered Existence of Merilee Marvelous)

"My genius is in my nostrils."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Index)

"WHORES.
Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him."
— Orson Welles

"You see Miss Gertrude is a genius. And a genius is a genius. So what if no one understands a word she writes. Some day they might."
— Jonah Winter (Gertrude is Gertrude is Gertrude is Gertrude)

"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
"
— Elbert Hubbard

"Genie währt länger als Schönheit."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"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

"If for instance the sentiment possessing for the moment the empire of our mind is sorrow, will not the genius sharpen the sorrow and the sorrow purify the genius? Together, will they not be like a cut diamond for which language is only the wax on which they stamp their imprint? I believe that genius, thus awakened, has no need to seek out details, that it scarcely pauses to reflect, that it never thinks of unity: I believe that the details come naturally without search by the poet, that inspiration takes the place of reflection and as for unity, I think there is no unity so perfect as that which results from a heart filled with a single idea...The nature of genius is related to that of instinct; it's operation is both simple and marvelous."
— Charlotte Brontë

"In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity."
— Benedictus de Spinoza (Spinoza in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte)

"Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"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 (If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit)

"An Widerständen zeigt sich das Genie des Generals, Glück verhüllt es."
— Quintus Horatius Flaccus

"Geniuses have the shortest biographies."
— Claire Messud (The Emperor's Children)

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

"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 (Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith)

"If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius. "
— Michelangelo Buonarroti

"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

"Geniuses don't become geniuses until they find the right moron to compare themselves to."
— James McGregor