Motivational Quotes

Genius

Accept your genius and say what you think.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Lewes, George Henry

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.

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

Koestler, Arthur

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

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

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

Stein, Gertrude

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

Oscar Wilde

All of us, you, your children, your neighbors and their children are everyday geniuses, even though the fact is unnoticed and unremembered by everyone. That's probably because school hasn't encouraged us to notice what's hidden inside us waiting for the right environment to express itself.

Kline, Peter

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

11.

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

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.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

14.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

18.

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

19.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Child, Lydia M.

23.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

27.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

28.

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

Ceran, C. W.

29.

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

Weil, Simone

30.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

31.

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

Oscar Levant

32.

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

33.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

34.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

35.

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

Churchill, Winston

36.

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

Picasso, Pablo

37.

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

Auden, W. H.

38.

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

39.

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

Ray, Man

40.

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

41.

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

William Hazlitt

42.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

43.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

44.

The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.