Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

Oscar Levant

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Oscar Wilde

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

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

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

Auden, W. H.

10.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

11.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

12.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

13.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

14.

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

15.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

16.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

17.

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

Stein, Gertrude

18.

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.

19.

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

Pound, Ezra

20.

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

Koestler, Arthur

21.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

22.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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.

24.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

25.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

26.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

27.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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.

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

Picasso, Pablo

33.

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

Edgard Varese

34.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

35.

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

36.

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

Aragon, Louis

37.

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

Heine, Heinrich

38.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

James, William

40.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

41.

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

Hume, David

42.

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

43.

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

Child, Lydia M.

44.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

45.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

46.

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

Ray, Man

47.

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

48.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

49.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

50.

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