Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Edison, Thomas A.

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Ray, Man

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

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

Stein, Gertrude

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature.

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

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

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

10.

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

Pound, Ezra

11.

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.

12.

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

Child, Lydia M.

13.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

14.

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

Heine, Heinrich

15.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

16.

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

Edgard Varese

17.

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

Lowell, James Russell

18.

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

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.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

21.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

24.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

28.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Welles, Orson

32.

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

James, William

33.

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

Oscar Wilde

34.

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

Samuel Butler

35.

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

Picasso, Pablo

36.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

37.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

38.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

39.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

40.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

Weil, Simone

43.

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

44.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

49.

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

50.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous