Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Heine, Heinrich

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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

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

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

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

Ceran, C. W.

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

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Lowell, James Russell

10.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

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 divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

13.

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

Oscar Wilde

14.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

15.

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

Child, Lydia M.

16.

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

Samuel Butler

17.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

18.

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

Stael, Germaine De

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

William Hazlitt

23.

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.

24.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

25.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

26.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

27.

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.

28.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Lewes, George Henry

30.

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

Koestler, Arthur

31.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

32.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Hume, David

38.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

39.

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

Ray, Man

40.

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

Picasso, Pablo

41.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

42.

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

43.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

44.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

45.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

46.

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

47.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

48.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

49.

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

50.

Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y