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

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

Fuller, Buckminster

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

True genius sees with the eyes of a child and thinks with the brain of a genius.

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

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

Weil, Simone

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

Edgard Varese

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

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

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

Picasso, Pablo

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

10.

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

11.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

12.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

13.

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

14.

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

Child, Lydia M.

15.

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

Welles, Orson

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

30.

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

Stein, Gertrude

31.

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

Heine, Heinrich

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

34.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

35.

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

Oscar Levant

36.

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

Pound, Ezra

37.

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

Auden, W. H.

38.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

39.

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

40.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

41.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

42.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

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.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

Oscar Wilde

48.

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

49.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

50.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo