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

Oscar Levant

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Ray, Man

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

10.

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

Samuel Butler

11.

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

12.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

13.

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.

14.

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

Churchill, Winston

15.

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

16.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

17.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

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

Koestler, Arthur

19.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

20.

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

21.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

22.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

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

Stael, Germaine De

26.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

27.

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

28.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

James, William

30.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

33.

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

Edgard Varese

34.

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

35.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

36.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

37.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

38.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Lewes, George Henry

40.

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

Stein, Gertrude

41.

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

42.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

43.

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

Weil, Simone

44.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

45.

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

46.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

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

Welles, Orson

49.

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

50.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John