John Petit-Senn Quotes

Wit lives in the present, but genius survives the future.

Genius is never understood in its own time.

Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself.

Genius is a talent only for living, those who possess it have little gift for dying.

Wit is the god of moments, but Genius is the god of ages.

The world, I think, will wait a long time for Nikola Tesla's equal in achievement and imagination.

That genius is feeble which cannot hold its own before the masterpieces of the world.

Innovation is often the ability to reach into the past and bring back what is good, what is beautiful, what is useful, what is lasting.

Men of great genius and large heart sow the seeds of a new degree of progress in the world, but they bear fruit only after many years.

A genius is a mentally ill person with an audience

The man of true genius never lives before his time, he never undertakes impossibilities, and always embarks on his enterprise at the suitable place and period. Though he may catch a glimpse of the coming light as it gilds the mountain top long before it reaches the eyes of his contemporaries, and he may hazard a prediction as to the future, he acts with the present.

Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

To be really great and interesting, you have to be a little crazy. I just don't think one comes without the other.

I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things; and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever - much cleverer than the discoverers - never originate anything.

Genius lasts longer than beauty

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

Genius is neither learned nor acquired. It is knowing without experience. It is risking without fear of failure. It is perception without touch. It is understanding without research. It is certainty without proof. It is ability without practice. It is invention without limitations. It is imagination without boundaries. It is creativity without constraints. It is...extraordinary intelligence!

Geniuses never pay attention.

There is a fine line between insanity and genius.

All those things that are now field to be of the greatest antiquity were at one time new; what we to-day hold up by example will rank hereafter as precedent.

Genius is insanity right up until it works.

The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.

Genius: The capacity to see and to express what is simple, simply!

The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.