Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Oscar Wilde

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

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

Edison, Thomas A.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

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

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

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

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

Auden, W. H.

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

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

Stein, Gertrude

13.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

14.

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

15.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

16.

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

17.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

18.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

19.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

21.

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

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.

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

Hume, David

24.

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

Weil, Simone

25.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

26.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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.

29.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

30.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

31.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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.

34.

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

Samuel Butler

35.

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

Stael, Germaine De

36.

One of the satisfactions of a genius is his will-power and obstinacy.

Ray, Man

37.

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

38.

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

39.

It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.

Lowell, James Russell

40.

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

41.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

42.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

43.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

44.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

45.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

46.

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

47.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

48.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

49.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

50.

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

James, William