Motivational Quotes

Genius

Accept your genius and say what you think.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Heine, Heinrich

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

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

Picasso, Pablo

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

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

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Churchill, Winston

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

13.

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

Weil, Simone

14.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

15.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

16.

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.

17.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

18.

Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.

Wilde, Oscar

19.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

20.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

21.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

Wilde, Oscar

23.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

27.

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

28.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

29.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

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

Hume, David

31.

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

Samuel Butler

32.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

33.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

34.

He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.

Robertson Davies

35.

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

Pound, Ezra

36.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

37.

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

Aragon, Louis

38.

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

39.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

Oscar Levant

44.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

45.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

46.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

47.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Welles, Orson