Great geniuses have always the shortest biographies. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

The life of great geniuses is nothing but a sublime storm. [ George Sand ]

The greatest geniuses have always attributed everything to God, as if conscious of being possessed of a spark of His divinity. [ B. R. Haydon ]

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

There is, I know not how, in the minds of men, a certain presage, as it were, of a future existence; and this takes the deepest root, and is most discoverable, in the greatest geniuses and most exalted souls. [ Cicero ]

We meet with few utterly dull and stupid souls: the sublime and transcendent are still fewer; the generality of mankind stand between, these two extremes: the interval is filled with multitudes of ordinary geniuses, but all very useful, and the ornaments and supports of the commonwealth. [ La Bruyere ]

As monarchs have a right to call in the specie of a state, and raise its value, by their own impression; so are there certain prerogative geniuses, who are above plagiaries, who cannot be said to steal, but, from their improvement of a thought, rather to borrow it, and repay the commonwealth of letters with interest again; and may more properly be said to adopt, than to kidnap a sentiment, by leaving it heir to their own fame. [ Sterne ]

Young people are dazzled by the brilliancy of antithesis, and employ it. Matter-of-fact men, and those who like precision, naturally fall into comparisons and metaphor. Sprightly natures, full of fire, and whom a boundless imagination carries beyond all rules, and even what is reasonable, cannot rest satisfied even with hyperbole. As for the sublime, it is only great geniuses and those of the very highest order that are able to rise to its height. [ Bruyere ]