Quotation.Cloud - A repository of notable quotations from across time and space

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.

 - E. F. Schumacher

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered - either by themselves or by others.

 - Mark Twain

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

 - Marilyn Monroe

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

 - Elbert Hubbard

In science the man of real genius is the man who invents a new method. The notable discoveries are often made by his successors, who can apply the method with fresh vigor, unimpaired by the previous labor of perfecting it; but the mental caliber of the thought required for their work, however brilliant, is not so great as that required by the first inventor of the method.

 - Bertrand Russell

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

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

 - Arthur Schopenhauer

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

 - Calvin Coolidge

Universities are, of course, hostile to geniuses, which seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

 - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces to its slothful owner the most abundant crop of poisons.

 - David Hume

The first thing obvious to children is what is sensible; and that we make no part of their rudiments. We press their memory too soon, and puzzle, strain, and load them with words and rules; to know grammar and rhetoric, and a strange tongue or two, that it is ten to one may never be useful to them; leaving their natural genius to mechanical and physical, or natural knowledge uncultivated and neglected; which would be of exceeding use and pleasure to them through the whole course of their Life.

 - William Penn