Motivational Quotes

Genius

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

- Aristotle

Best Quotes about Genius

Genius sits in a glass house -- but in an unbreakable one --conceiving ideas. After giving birth, it falls into madness. Stretches out its hand through the window toward the first person happening by. The demon's claw rips, the iron fist grips. Before, you were a model, mocks the ironic voice between serrated teeth, for me, you are raw material to work on. I throw you against the glass wall, so that you remain stuck there, projected and stuck. (Then come the lovers of art and contemplate the bleeding work from outside. Then come the photographers. New art, it says in the newspaper the following day. The learned journals give it a name that ends in ism.)

Klee, Paul

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

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

Oscar Wilde

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.

Heine, Heinrich

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

10.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

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.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

15.

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

16.

The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.

Colton, Charles Caleb

17.

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

18.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

19.

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

Ray, Man

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

22.

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

Wilde, Oscar

23.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

24.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

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

Weil, Simone

26.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

27.

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

28.

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

Churchill, Winston

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

31.

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.

32.

Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

33.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

34.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

35.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

36.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

37.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

38.

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

39.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

43.

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

James, William

44.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

45.

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

46.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

47.

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

Aragon, Louis

48.

It is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.

Picasso, Pablo

49.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.