Motivational Quotes

Genius

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

- Calvino, Italo

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

William Hazlitt

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

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

James, William

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

Koestler, Arthur

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

Samuel Butler

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

10.

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

Pound, Ezra

11.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

12.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

13.

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

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

Auden, W. H.

15.

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.

16.

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

Lowell, James Russell

17.

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

18.

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

Oscar Wilde

19.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

20.

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

21.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

22.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

23.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

24.

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

Oscar Levant

25.

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

26.

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

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.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

31.

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

Churchill, Winston

32.

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

33.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

37.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

38.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

40.

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

Stein, Gertrude

41.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

42.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

43.

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

Ray, Man

44.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

47.

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

Edgard Varese

48.

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

Child, Lydia M.

49.

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.

50.

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.