Michael Eisner Quotes

What Einstein was able to do was - to use a cliche - think out of the box.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.

I've always been controversial because I offer new ideas. For me to be controversial, I think this is positive.

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.

It is not necessary to be too avant-garde, because you risk not being understood.

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path ... It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts for distinction.

Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.

Genius disregards the boundaries of propriety. Genius is permitted to shout if shouting is productive.

Your mission statement says Galer Street is based on global "connectitude." (You people don't just think outside the box, you think outside the dictionary!)

No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

If you're ahead of your time, who's going to listen? If you're behind the times, it's boring.

Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.

I wouldn't know how to think inside the box because I don't even know where it is. I wouldn't know how to do it any other way.

What seems like a crazy idea today eventually grows. It's a 'with hindsight' thing. One day, someone will turn around and say, 'That was genius.'

Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.

I'm looking for people who are at the cutting edge of what they do, who think out-of-the-box. Even if their work is something common today, it might have been absolutely new when they started out, so we'd like to hear of their beginnings.

I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement - it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.

Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men as lunatics.

What guides me is to do work that's more avant-garde - things that I think are special. You can easily become a celebrity and get caught up in all that blur. I just want to work and surprise myself.

If the idea is really new and unique and big, other people will all think it is bad and is going to fail.

Talent does what it can; genius does what it must.