Intelligence Quotes
Emerson leads this page, followed by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Isaac D’Israeli, the American humorist Josh Billings and Simone Weil. For sourced lines there is Disraeli, in Contarini Fleming (1832), saying patience is a necessary ingredient of genius, and Emerson in English Traits (1856), remarking that the hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.
Three popular lines carry flags. “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent” is credited to Einstein and marked misattributed. A line about the centuries rarely producing a genius, credited to David Lloyd George, is also marked misattributed. William Feather’s remark that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person is disputed.
There’s an old saying: The genius sees what happens, but the plodder sees what he expects to happen.
Talent jogs to conclusions to which Genius takes giant leaps.
A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.
An average idea enthusiastically embraced will go further than a genius idea no one gets.
Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.