Joshua Foer Quotes

Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.

But inspiration? - That's when you come home from abroad and are asked: Well, have you found inspiration? - and fortunately you haven't. But the impressions sink in, of course, and may emerge later: None of us has invented the house; that was done many thousands of years ago.

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

We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.

People may say that what I do is very clever, but it's not really at all. It's not Swift.

Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.

The difference between being able to understand something and inventing it in the first place... is called genius.

Nietzsche claimed that his genius was in his nostrils and I think that is a very excellent place for it to be.

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

A possible link between 'madness' and genius is one of the oldest and most persistent of cultural notions.

The only way you can get good, unless you're a genius, is to copy. That's the best thing. Just steal.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.

Geniuses always think it's easier than we make it out to be.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

Since when was genius found respectable?

Genius is the very eye of intellect and the wing of thought; it is always in advance of its time, and is the pioneer for the generation which it precedes.

Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe.

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

I want to explore the borders between being a genius and being an idiot.

There is only a very thin line which separates a genius from the eccentric.

Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.