Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Edgard Varese

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Hume, David

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

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

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

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

Edgard Varese

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

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

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

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

10.

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

Child, Lydia M.

11.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

12.

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

Churchill, Winston

13.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

14.

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

15.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

James, William

20.

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

Lewes, George Henry

21.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

22.

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

23.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

24.

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.

25.

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

Stein, Gertrude

26.

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

Welles, Orson

27.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

28.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

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.

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

Pound, Ezra

32.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

35.

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.

36.

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

Heine, Heinrich

37.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

38.

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

Oscar Wilde

39.

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

Weil, Simone

40.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

41.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

42.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

43.

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

44.

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

Stael, Germaine De

45.

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

Aragon, Louis

46.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

47.

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

48.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

49.

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

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