Motivational Quotes

Genius

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

- Aragon, Louis

Best Quotes about Genius

Everybody denies I am a genius --but nobody ever called me one!

Welles, Orson

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

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Oscar Levant

The real people of genius were resolute workers not idle dreamers.

Lewes, George Henry

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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

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

I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.

Fuller, Buckminster

10.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

11.

The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.

Trevor-Roper, H. R.

12.

The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

Koestler, Arthur

13.

Who in the same given time can produce more than others has vigor; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

14.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

15.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

17.

Genius is, to be sure, not a matter of arbitrariness, but rather of freedom, just as wit, love, and faith, which once shall become arts and disciplines. We should demand genius from everybody, without, however, expecting it.

Schlegel, Friedrich

18.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

20.

The first and last thing required of genius is, love of the truth.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

22.

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Edison, Thomas A.

23.

Geniuses themselves don't talk about the gift of genius, they just talk about hard work and long hours.

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

24.

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

Edgard Varese

25.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

26.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

27.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

28.

The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

29.

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

Pound, Ezra

30.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

A genius is one who can do anything except make a living.

Adams, Joey Lauren

32.

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

Hume, David

33.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

Weil, Simone

38.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

39.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.

Lowell, James Russell

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Oscar Wilde

45.

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

Auden, W. H.

46.

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.

Beauvoir, Simone De

47.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

Churchill, Winston

48.

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

49.

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.

Da Vinci, Leonardo

50.

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

Samuel Butler