Motivational Quotes

Genius

Genius is sorrow's child.

- Adams, John

Best Quotes about Genius

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Woolf, Virginia

He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.

Robertson Davies

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea -- possessing them -- that what has been said has still not been said enough.

Delacroix, Eugene

Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.

Stael, Germaine De

As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius -- the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

Wilde, Oscar

Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature.

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

10.

True genius sees with the eyes of a child and thinks with the brain of a genius.

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

11.

Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police.

Joyce, James

12.

His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.

Edison, Thomas A.

13.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

14.

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

15.

Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.

Edgard Varese

16.

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

19.

One of the satisfactions of a genius is his will-power and obstinacy.

Ray, Man

20.

Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

21.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

22.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

23.

The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.

Child, Lydia M.

24.

Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitual way.

James, William

25.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

26.

Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.

Dahlberg, Edward

27.

Genius is the ability to act rightly without precedent -- the power to do the right thing the first time.

Hubbard, Elbert

28.

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

Pound, Ezra

29.

There is one subtle but important difference between genius and stupidity and that is that genius has its limits. You'll see yourself clearest in the eyes of your friends.

30.

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

Samuel Butler

31.

Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

32.

Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have is this. When I have a subject in mind. I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it... the effort which I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.

Hamilton, Alexander

33.

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

Calvino, Italo

34.

Talent is a faculty that is highly developed, but genius commands all the faculties.

Hedge, Francis Herbert

35.

Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.

Ceran, C. W.

36.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

37.

I really cannot know whether I am or am not the Genius you are pleased to call me, but I am very willing to put up with the mistake, if it be one. It is a title dearly enough bought by most men, to render it endurable, even when not quite clearly made out, which it never can be till the Posterity, whose decisions are merely dreams to ourselves, has sanctioned or denied it, while it can touch us no further.

Byron, Lord

38.

When human power becomes so great and original that we can account for it only as a kind of divine imagination, we call it genius.

Crashaw, William

39.

Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass spoil a draught of fair water.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

40.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

42.

The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds.

Hume, David

43.

Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders.

Erasmus, Desiderius

44.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

45.

All the means of action -- the shapeless masses -- the materials -- lie everywhere about us. What we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into the transparent crystal, bright and clear. That fire is genius.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

46.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

47.

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.

William Hazlitt

48.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

Rising genius always shoots out its rays from among the clouds, but these will gradually roll away and disappear as it ascends to its steady luster.