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

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

Koestler, Arthur

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

William Hazlitt

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.

Lowell, James Russell

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

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

James, William

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

10.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

11.

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

Ray, Man

12.

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

13.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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.

15.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

16.

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

Ceran, C. W.

17.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

18.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

19.

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

20.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

21.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

24.

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

Pound, Ezra

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

34.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

35.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

36.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

37.

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

38.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

39.

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

Stein, Gertrude

40.

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

Wilde, Oscar

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

44.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

45.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

46.

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