In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought.
The genius of the Marx Brothers is for parody. They never are themselves. They exist too abundantly to be content with being that - they must go on, by the rapidest of transitions, to being something else. Groucho, in my opinion the bright star among the three, is never anything but the thing he is at the moment pretending to be.
There is the myth that writing books for children is easier than writing books for grownups, whereas we know that truly great books for children are works of genius, whether it's 'Alice in Wonderland' or the 'Gruffalo' or 'Northern Lights.' When it's a great book, it's a great book, whether it's for children or not.
When my nephew was 3 and 4, he would say the most genius things. He said, You're hammer macho with FBI dogs. I thought it was just one of those great lines.
Rogers and Hammerstein were such a genius pair. They were able to touch on subject matter so far ahead of its time.
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
Jim Carrey, a comic genius, has a harder time overcoming the public's desire for him to be funny simply because he's so good at it.
I've never met a genius. A genius to me is someone who does well at something he hates. Anybody can do well at something he loves - it's just a question of finding the subject.
Professor Hawking is heralded as 'the genius of Britain,' yet he believes in the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything and that life sprang from non-life. Why should anyone believe Mr. Hawking's writings if he cannot provide evidence for his unscientific belief that out of nothing, everything came?
There is no hierarchy of values any more. Real progress is due mainly to human genius, and that's rare, and usually stems from a real elite, from a hierarchy.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.
An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius.
When you deal with Alan Ball, you're dealing with a person who is a genius in terms of how art imitates life.
The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.
It is Proust's implacable honesty, his reluctance to cut corners or to articulate what might have been good enough or credible enough in any other writer that make him the introspective genius he is.
What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?
The true genius of a great manager is his or her ability to individualize. A great manager is one who understands how to trip each person's trigger.
While Napoleon believed his fortunes to be governed by destiny, his real genius lay in self-control and martial daring coupled with an indomitable will to power.
I don't think that genius goes hand in hand with being socially inept or being a sociopath or being a misanthrope, but I do think that it is a mind that can think so differently - so beyond how one is supposed to think.
