Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

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

Edgard Varese

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

10.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

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.

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

13.

To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

18.

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

19.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Hume, David

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Ray, Man

24.

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.

25.

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

Lewes, George Henry

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 public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Oscar Wilde

28.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

29.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

30.

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

Samuel Butler

31.

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

Koestler, Arthur

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

35.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

40.

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.

41.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

43.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

45.

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

46.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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

Oscar Levant

48.

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

Welles, Orson

49.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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