Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Erasmus, Desiderius

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Lewes, George Henry

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

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

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

James, William

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.

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

Edgard Varese

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

Aragon, Louis

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.

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

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

11.

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

Heine, Heinrich

12.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Woolf, Virginia

13.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

14.

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

15.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

16.

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.

17.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

18.

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

Churchill, Winston

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Auden, W. H.

23.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

24.

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

25.

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

26.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

27.

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

Samuel Butler

28.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

29.

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

Oscar Wilde

30.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

31.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

William Hazlitt

33.

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

Hume, David

34.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

35.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

36.

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

37.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

38.

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

Ceran, C. W.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Child, Lydia M.

42.

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

43.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

44.

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

45.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

46.

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

47.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

48.

Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature.

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

49.

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

50.

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

Oscar Levant