Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Erasmus, Desiderius

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

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

James, William

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

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

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

Weil, Simone

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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

10.

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

Pound, Ezra

11.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

12.

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

13.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

14.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

15.

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

Oscar Levant

16.

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

Oscar Wilde

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

20.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

21.

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

22.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

23.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

William Hazlitt

25.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

26.

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

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

32.

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

33.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

34.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

35.

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

Aragon, Louis

36.

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

Picasso, Pablo

37.

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.

38.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

39.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

40.

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

Wilde, Oscar

41.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

42.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

43.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

44.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

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.

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

Hume, David

47.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

49.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

50.

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