Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Dahlberg, Edward

Best Quotes about Genius

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

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

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

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

Ceran, C. W.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

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

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

Hume, David

10.

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

Edgard Varese

11.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

12.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

13.

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

Samuel Butler

14.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

15.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

16.

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

Heine, Heinrich

17.

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

18.

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

Oscar Levant

19.

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.

20.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

21.

True genius sees with the eyes of a child and thinks with the brain of a genius.

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

22.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

23.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

24.

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

Stael, Germaine De

25.

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

Aragon, Louis

26.

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

James, William

27.

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

28.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

29.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Ray, Man

31.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

32.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

33.

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.

34.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

35.

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

Picasso, Pablo

36.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

37.

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

Koestler, Arthur

38.

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

39.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

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.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

Auden, W. H.

47.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

48.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

Welles, Orson

50.

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