Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Best Quotes about Genius

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

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

Stael, Germaine De

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Aragon, Louis

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

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

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

Picasso, Pablo

As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius -- the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

Oscar Wilde

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

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

Lewes, George Henry

19.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

20.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

24.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

25.

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

26.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

27.

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

28.

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

Churchill, Winston

29.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

30.

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

31.

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

Auden, W. H.

32.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

33.

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

Stein, Gertrude

34.

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

35.

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

William Hazlitt

36.

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

37.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

38.

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

Pound, Ezra

39.

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

40.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

44.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

45.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

49.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

50.

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

Weil, Simone