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

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

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

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

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 public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Oscar Wilde

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

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

10.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.

William Hazlitt

12.

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

13.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

14.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

15.

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

Auden, W. H.

16.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

17.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

18.

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

19.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

20.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Koestler, Arthur

25.

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

Edgard Varese

26.

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

Heine, Heinrich

27.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

28.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

29.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

30.

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

James, William

31.

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enoughto think they can change the world
Are the ones who do.

Apple Computer

32.

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.

33.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

34.

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

Ceran, C. W.

35.

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

36.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

38.

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.

39.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

40.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

41.

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

42.

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

Stael, Germaine De

43.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

47.

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

Stein, Gertrude

48.

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