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

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

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

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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

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

Lewes, George Henry

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.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

10.

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

Edgard Varese

11.

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

12.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

13.

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

James, William

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.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

16.

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

17.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

18.

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

19.

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

Ceran, C. W.

20.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

21.

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

Picasso, Pablo

22.

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

Heine, Heinrich

23.

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.

24.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

25.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

26.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

27.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

28.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

29.

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.

30.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

35.

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

Child, Lydia M.

36.

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

Aragon, Louis

37.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

38.

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

39.

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

Oscar Wilde

40.

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

Churchill, Winston

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

Welles, Orson

44.

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

45.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

46.

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

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

49.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

50.

It is not because the touch of genius has roused genius to production, but because the admiration of genius has made talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant.

Fuller, Margaret