Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

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

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

William Hazlitt

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

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.

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

Koestler, Arthur

13.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

14.

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

15.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

16.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

17.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

18.

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

Auden, W. H.

19.

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

Samuel Butler

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

22.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

23.

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

Weil, Simone

24.

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

25.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

26.

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.

27.

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

Edgard Varese

28.

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

Aragon, Louis

29.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

30.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

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.

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

33.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Picasso, Pablo

35.

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

36.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

37.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

38.

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

39.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

40.

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

Heine, Heinrich

41.

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

42.

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

Child, Lydia M.

43.

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

44.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

45.

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

46.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

47.

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

Hume, David

48.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

49.

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