Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Heine, Heinrich

Best Quotes about Genius

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

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

It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.

Lowell, James Russell

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

Oscar Levant

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

Lewes, George Henry

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

10.

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

Wilde, Oscar

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Aragon, Louis

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

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.

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

20.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

28.

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

Pound, Ezra

29.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

30.

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

Churchill, Winston

31.

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.

32.

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.

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

35.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

36.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

37.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

38.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

39.

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

William Hazlitt

40.

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

41.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

43.

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

Edgard Varese

44.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

45.

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

Oscar Wilde

46.

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

Stein, Gertrude

47.

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

Auden, W. H.

48.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

50.

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