Motivational Quotes

Genius

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

- Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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

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

Hume, David

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

Lewes, George Henry

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

10.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

11.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

12.

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.

13.

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.

14.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enoughto think they can change the world
Are the ones who do.

Apple Computer

18.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

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.

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

21.

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.

22.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

23.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

24.

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

Ray, Man

25.

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

Welles, Orson

26.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

27.

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

Oscar Wilde

28.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

29.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

30.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

31.

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

Auden, W. H.

32.

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

33.

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

Samuel Butler

34.

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

Stael, Germaine De

35.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

37.

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

Koestler, Arthur

38.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

39.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

40.

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

Aragon, Louis

41.

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

Churchill, Winston

42.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

45.

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

46.

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

Wilde, Oscar

47.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

49.

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

50.

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