"A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself." - Samuel Johnson

"Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together." - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"There is no genius free from some tincture of madness." - Seneca

"A child prodigy is one with highly imaginative parents." - Unknown

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." - THOMAS EDISON, quoted in F.L. Dyer's Edison: His Life and Inventions

"Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering-pot and pruning-knife." - MARGARET FULLER, diary entry

"Gift, like genius, I often think only means an infinite capacity for taking pains." - JANE ELLICE HOPKINS, Work Amongst Working Men

"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." - JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses

"I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." - JOHN F. KENNEDY, speech (honoring Nobel Prize winners, 1962)

"Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is." - JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, Literary Essays

"Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can." - OWEN MEREDITH, Last Words of a Sensitive Second-Rate Poet

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." - JONATHAN SWIFT, Thoughts on Various Subjects