Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Auden, W. H.

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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

Churchill, Winston

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

Edison, Thomas A.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

12.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

13.

All of us, you, your children, your neighbors and their children are everyday geniuses, even though the fact is unnoticed and unremembered by everyone. That's probably because school hasn't encouraged us to notice what's hidden inside us waiting for the right environment to express itself.

Kline, Peter

14.

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

Edgard Varese

15.

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

Ceran, C. W.

16.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

17.

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.

18.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

19.

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

Oscar Levant

20.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

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

Picasso, Pablo

22.

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.

23.

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

Oscar Wilde

24.

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

Ray, Man

25.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

26.

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

27.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

28.

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.

29.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

30.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

31.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

32.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

33.

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

34.

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

Auden, W. H.

35.

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

Koestler, Arthur

36.

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

Samuel Butler

37.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

38.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

40.

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

Child, Lydia M.

41.

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

42.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

43.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

44.

What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

45.

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

Stael, Germaine De

46.

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

47.

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

Pound, Ezra

48.

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

49.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

50.

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.