Eugene Wigner, himself no dummyhead (or, to use the phrase
that Pauli grudgingly conceded to Einstein, “not so stupid), a Nobel Prize
physicist, said, concerning the mathematician/physicist/you-name-it John von
Neumann,
“Whenever I talked with the
sharpest intellect whom I have known -- with von Neumann -- I always had the
impression that only hé was fully
awake, that I was halfway in a dream.”
(quoted in George Dyson, Darwin among the Machines (1997), p. 77.)
For an overview of the abjectly humble outlook among many of those who would generally
be considered quite gifted, see
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