Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Genius

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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

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

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

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

Fuller, Buckminster

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Samuel Butler

10.

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

Weil, Simone

11.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

12.

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

13.

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

Koestler, Arthur

14.

Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

15.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

18.

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

Oscar Levant

19.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

20.

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

21.

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

Wilde, Oscar

22.

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

Hume, David

23.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

27.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

28.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

29.

Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitual way.

James, William

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

33.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

34.

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

Ceran, C. W.

35.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

36.

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.

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

39.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

40.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

42.

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

Picasso, Pablo

43.

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

Child, Lydia M.

44.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

45.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

46.

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

William Hazlitt

47.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Heine, Heinrich