Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.
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.
Not only is he not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.
I don't care about that scum! Why should I receive a prize? I know that I'm a genius!
Genius is rare as turtle fangs, but talent is common enough.
Like autumn leaves, bad days fell away as though the genius of the room could not retain them.
No pessimist ever won an audience commensurately wide with his genius.
Once genius is submerged by bureaucracy, a nation is doomed to mediocrity.
We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
Improvement makes strait roads: but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.
Nor ought a genius less than his that writ
Attempt translation.
Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence.
I grant you he’s a genius, but don’t you dare try to tell me he’s sane.
The Irish genius has always stressed spiritual and intellectual rather than material values.