Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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

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

Stael, Germaine De

Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

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

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

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

Hubbard, Elbert

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

10.

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

11.

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

Oscar Wilde

12.

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.

13.

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

Ray, Man

14.

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

Welles, Orson

15.

What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

16.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

17.

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

Heine, Heinrich

18.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

19.

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

20.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

21.

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

22.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

23.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

24.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

25.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

26.

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

William Hazlitt

27.

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

28.

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

Ceran, C. W.

29.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

30.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Oscar Levant

37.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

Edgard Varese

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

47.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

48.

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

49.

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

Lewes, George Henry

50.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo