genius

One needn't be a crank to miss the scientific boat. The very paragon of genius, Albert Einstein, couldn't be persuaded to give quantum physics his unreserved endorsement. Here is Einstein's most frequently paraphrased statement of dissatisfaction with the theory: Quantum mechanics is very impressive. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory yields a lot, but it hardly brings us any closer to the secret of the Old One. In any case I am convinced that He doesn't play dice.

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.

I don't want to be a genius - I have enough problems just trying to be a man.

While Genius was thus wasting his strength in eccentric flights, I saw a person of a very different appearance, named Application.

The art of leadership . . . consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention. . . . The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belong to one category.

The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity.

These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great challenges are formed. . . . Great necessities call out great virtues.

The only difference between a genius and one of common capacity is that the former anticipates and explores what the latter accidentally hits upon; but even the man of genius himself more frequently employs the advantages that chance presents him; it is the lapidary who gives value to the diamond which the peasant has dug up without knowing its value.