Motivational Quotes

Genius

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Oscar Levant

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

Geniuses themselves don't talk about the gift of genius, they just talk about hard work and long hours.

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Stael, Germaine De

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

10.

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

11.

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

Heine, Heinrich

12.

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

13.

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

Picasso, Pablo

14.

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

15.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

16.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

17.

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.

18.

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

Edgard Varese

19.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

20.

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

Pound, Ezra

21.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

22.

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

23.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

24.

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

25.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

26.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

31.

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

32.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

33.

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

34.

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

William Hazlitt

35.

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

Calvino, Italo

36.

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

37.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

38.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

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

Aragon, Louis

42.

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

43.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

44.

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

45.

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

Weil, Simone

46.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.