Genius does what it must, talent does what it can.
Robert Bulwer Lytton
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
Albert Camus
Such is the privilege of genius; it perceives, it seizes relations where vulgar eyes see only isolated facts.
Franois Jean Dominique Arago
The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.
Honor de Balzac
Genius is always accompanied by enthusiasm.
Bryant McGill
Dullness is so much stronger than genius because there is so much more of it, and it is better organised and more naturally cohesive.
Samuel Butler
Genius is the gold in the mine; talent is the miner that works and brings it out.
Lady Marguerite Blessington
The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.
Lydia Maria Child
Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance... thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste... if a man could undertake to make use of all the things in his dustbin, he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Genius is fostered by energy.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Genius discovers a system; average talent stereotypes it till it is shattered by fresh genius. It is dangerous for an army to be led by veterans; for on the other side God may place Napoleon.
Sri Aurobindo
A great composition to me is.. an incarnation of a genius, of all that was ever in him of the slightest consequence.
Sir Neville Cardus
Genius...has been defined as a supreme capacity for taking trouble...It might be more fitly described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds and keeping them therein so long as the genius remains.
Samuel Butler
Most artists, whether in religion, music, literature, painting, or what not, are shopkeepers in disguise. They hide their shop as much as they can, and keep pretending that it does not exist, but they are essentially shopkeepers and nothing else.
Samuel Butler