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

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

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.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

11.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Heine, Heinrich

13.

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

14.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

15.

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

16.

The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

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

Welles, Orson

18.

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

Weil, Simone

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Aragon, Louis

22.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

23.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

24.

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.

25.

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

Samuel Butler

26.

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

27.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

William Hazlitt

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

Stael, Germaine De

35.

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

36.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

37.

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

Churchill, Winston

38.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

39.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

40.

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

Oscar Wilde

41.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

42.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

43.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

44.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

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

Lewes, George Henry

46.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

50.

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

Picasso, Pablo