Genius Quotes
“the capacity to do extraordinary things was a gift of
soothsayers and gods.” ~Plato
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” ~William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.” ~Simone de Beauvoir, French philosopher
“Sometimes in a supernatural fashion a single body is lavishly supplied with such beauty, grace, and ability that wherever the individual turns, each of his actions is so divine that he leaves behind all other men and clearly makes himself known as a genius endowed by God (which he is).” ~Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), the acclaimed biographer of the great Renaissance artists
“The dragonfly flies with four wings, and when those in front are raised those behind are lowered.” ~Leonardo da Vinci, 1490
“When I write songs, I hear melodies and I hear lyrics but I also see colours; I see sound like a wall of colours.” ~Lady Gaga, Guardian, 2009 interview
“Prince, you are what you are through the accident of birth; what I am, I am through myself. There have been and will be thousands of princes; there is only one Beethoven.” ~Ludwig van Beethoven, 1806
“I was built this way for a reason, so I’m going to use it. I really had to focus on the fundamentals, such as doing the drills, doing a lot of all the basics, doing the mental work, so that I could be where I am today.” ~Simone Biles, MasterClass, 2019, whom the New York Times calls “the greatest American gymnast of all time.”
“(it would be possible) to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, (as well as) a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.” ~Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (1969)
“The exploration of my ancestors . . . leads nowhere.” ~Albert Einstein (implying hat ancestry is not a good predictor of genius)
“We conclude that individuals acquire virtually all of the distinguishing characteristics of expert performers through relevant activities (deliberate practice).” ~Anders Ericsson, the godfather of the discipline of performance expertise. Beginning in a 1993 article in Psychological Review and continuing through his coauthored book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (2016), Ericsson posited that human greatness is not a
genetic gift but simply the result of disciplined hard work, 10,000 hours of focused practice
“Cézanne is the father of us all.” ~Pablo Picasso
“The abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness” may be ill advised.” ~Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould
“The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance.” ~Adam Grant, Wharton Business School Professor
“Academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and teamwork skills, or social, emotional and political intelligence. Yes, straight-A students master cramming information and regurgitating it on exams. But career success is
rarely about finding the right solution to a problem—it’s more about finding the right problem to solve.” ~Adam Grant, Wharton Business School Professor
“The A students get hired to teach in the universities, and the B’s get relatively good jobs working for the C’s.” ~Adam Grant, Wharton Business School Professor
“Students can often sense the tension that their teachers are
feeling between wanting to honor the questions in the room, or the interest in the room, and wanting to prepare students for a test that’s not set by the school.” ~Dr. Jessica Levenstein, Horace Mann head of upper division, 2018
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” ~Albert Einstein
“Most of our qualities are innate.”~ Charles Darwin, English Naturalist.
“genius is an explosive and seemingly random event arising from a combination of many personal phenotypes—among them intelligence, resilience, curiosity, visionary thinking, and more than a dash of obsessive behavior. Psychologists call it “emergenesis”; we laymen prefer the term “perfect storm.” It can happen, but it’s a long shot.” ~Craig M. Wright, Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor Emeritus of Music at Yale University, where he teaches the popular undergraduate course, Exploring the Nature of Genius. A Guggenheim Fellow, Wright has received an honorary Doctorate of Human Letters from the University of Chicago, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the Sewall Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Yale (2016) as well as the DeVane Medal for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship (2018). He holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the Eastman School of Music and a Ph.D. from Harvard, Author, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness
“In truth, there are at least three hundred great colleges in the United States, and it doesn’t much matter which one of these you attend. What matters is not the school, but what is inside of you (or your child).” ~Craig M. Wright, Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor Emeritus of Music at Yale University
Geniuses Work Hard Quotes
“If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn’t call it genius” ~Michelangelo
“I should get discouraged if I could not go on working as
hard or even harder” ~Vincent van Gogh
“Genius is the result of hard work” ~Maxim Gorky
“I didn’t believe in weekends. I didn’t believe in vacations” ~Bill Gates
“There is no talent or genius without hard work” ~Dmitri Mendeleev
“What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work” ~Stephen King
“I worked very hard when I was young so I don’t have to work so hard now” ~Mozart
“People may not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get” ~Frederick Douglass
“No one ever changed the world with a forty-hour work week” ~Elon Musk
“God gives talent. Work transforms talent into genius” ~Anna Pavlova
