Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius. – Henri Frederic Amiel
To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius. – Henri Frederic Amiel
The function of genius is to furnish cretins with ideas twenty years later. – Louis Aragon
We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later. – Louis Aragon
There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him. – Antonin Artaud
There are big men, men of intellect, intellectual men, men of talent and men of action; but the great man is difficult to find, and it needs –apart from discernment –a certain greatness to find him. – Margot Asquith
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do. – W. H. Auden
Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with mans physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed. – Charles Baudelaire
Genius is childhood recaptured. – Jean Baudrillard
One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius. – Simone de Beauvoir
Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks. – Henry Ward Beecher
Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up. – Max Beerbohm
Genius is the gold in the mine; talent is the miner who works and brings it out. – Marguerite Blessington
Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length. – Christian Nevell Bovee
Since when was genius found respectable? – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience. – Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon
A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind. – Samuel Butler
