Motivational Quotes

Genius

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

- Aristotle

Best Quotes about Genius

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

It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

Stein, Gertrude

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

10.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

11.

It is not because the touch of genius has roused genius to production, but because the admiration of genius has made talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant.

Fuller, Margaret

12.

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

13.

What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

14.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

15.

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

Oscar Levant

16.

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

17.

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

Ray, Man

18.

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

19.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

20.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

21.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

22.

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

Hume, David

23.

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

24.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

25.

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

Oscar Wilde

26.

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

William Hazlitt

27.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

28.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

29.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

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

James, William

31.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

32.

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

Ceran, C. W.

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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.

35.

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

Aragon, Louis

36.

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

37.

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.

Irving, Washington

38.

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

Pound, Ezra

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Child, Lydia M.

42.

Nothing is so envied as genius, nothing so hopeless of attainment by labor alone. Though labor always accompanies the greatest genius, without the intellectual gift labor alone will do little.

Hayden, B. R.

43.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

44.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

45.

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Carl Sagan

46.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

Stael, Germaine De

50.

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