One thing that humbles me deeply is to see that human genius has its limits while human stupidity does not.
[Une chose qui m’humilie profondément est de voir que le génie humain a des limites, quand la bêtise humaine n’en a pas.]
Alexandre Dumas, fils (1824-1895) French writer and dramatist
(Attributed)
(Source)Earliest attribution is in the Great Universal Dictionary of the Nineteenth Century [Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe Siècle], Vol. 2, "Stupidity [Bêtise]" (c. 1865)
Attributed to a wide variety of individuals, including (spuriously) to Albert Einstein.
Variants:
- "What distresses me is to see that human genius has limitations, and human stupidity has none."
- "How despairing it is to see that human genius has limitations, while human stupidity has none."
- "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
- "Human genius has its limits, but stupidity does not."
- "Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." (Elbert Hubbard, ed., The Philistine, title epigraph (Sep 1906)
See here for more discussion.
