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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

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

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

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

Lewes, George Henry

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

Stael, Germaine De

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

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

Picasso, Pablo

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

Churchill, Winston

10.

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

Child, Lydia M.

11.

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

Oscar Levant

12.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

13.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

14.

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

Ray, Man

15.

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

Hume, David

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

19.

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

Heine, Heinrich

20.

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

21.

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

Oscar Wilde

22.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

23.

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

24.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

28.

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

Welles, Orson

29.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

30.

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

31.

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

Ceran, C. W.

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.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

34.

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

35.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

36.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

38.

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

Stein, Gertrude

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

41.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

42.

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

Wilde, Oscar

43.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

44.

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

Pound, Ezra

45.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

46.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

47.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)