Motivational Quotes

Genius

Genius is independent of situation.

- Churchill, Charles

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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

Ceran, C. W.

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

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

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

Ray, Man

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

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

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

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.

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

Edgard Varese

11.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

12.

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

13.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

14.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

15.

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

Oscar Levant

16.

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

Welles, Orson

17.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

23.

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

Child, Lydia M.

24.

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

Picasso, Pablo

25.

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

26.

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

Stein, Gertrude

27.

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.

28.

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

Weil, Simone

29.

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

30.

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

Koestler, Arthur

31.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

32.

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

33.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

34.

What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea -- possessing them -- that what has been said has still not been said enough.

Delacroix, Eugene

35.

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

Aragon, Louis

36.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

37.

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

Samuel Butler

38.

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

Lowell, James Russell

39.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

40.

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

Pound, Ezra

41.

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

Oscar Wilde

42.

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

43.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

44.

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

James, William

45.

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

Churchill, Winston

46.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

50.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)