Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Hedge, Francis Herbert

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Welles, Orson

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

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.

Beauvoir, Simone De

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

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

Edgard Varese

10.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

Ray, Man

15.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

17.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

18.

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

Auden, W. H.

19.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

20.

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

Koestler, Arthur

21.

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

Lewes, George Henry

22.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

23.

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

24.

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

Churchill, Winston

25.

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.

26.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

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.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

31.

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

Samuel Butler

32.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

33.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

34.

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

35.

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

Heine, Heinrich

36.

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

37.

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

Stein, Gertrude

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

41.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

Hume, David

43.

What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea -- possessing them -- that what has been said has still not been said enough.

Delacroix, Eugene

44.

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

Child, Lydia M.

45.

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

Ceran, C. W.

46.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

47.

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

William Hazlitt

48.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

49.

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

50.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett