Motivational Quotes

Genius

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

- Hugo, Victor

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Fuller, Buckminster

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

Hume, David

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

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

Picasso, Pablo

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

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

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enoughto think they can change the world
Are the ones who do.

Apple Computer

11.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

12.

What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

14.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

15.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Aragon, Louis

20.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

21.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

22.

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

Edgard Varese

23.

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

24.

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

Child, Lydia M.

25.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

26.

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

William Hazlitt

27.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

28.

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

29.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

30.

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

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

33.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

34.

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

35.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

36.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

37.

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

Weil, Simone

38.

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

39.

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

Auden, W. H.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Churchill, Winston

43.

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

44.

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

Stael, Germaine De

45.

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

46.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

47.

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

Samuel Butler

48.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

49.

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