Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Churchill, Winston

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

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

Lewes, George Henry

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

Aragon, Louis

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

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Stein, Gertrude

10.

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

Stael, Germaine De

11.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

12.

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

13.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

14.

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

15.

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

Pound, Ezra

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

19.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

20.

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

Weil, Simone

21.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

22.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

23.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

24.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

25.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

26.

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

Ceran, C. W.

27.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

28.

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

Picasso, Pablo

29.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

30.

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.

31.

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

Welles, Orson

32.

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

Oscar Wilde

33.

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

Koestler, Arthur

34.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

39.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

40.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

41.

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

Hume, David

42.

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

Ray, Man

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

Oscar Levant

48.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

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.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo