Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Hume, David

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

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

Dahlberg, Edward

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

Oscar Levant

To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

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

10.

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

11.

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

Aragon, Louis

12.

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

Lewes, George Henry

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

16.

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

Pound, Ezra

17.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

18.

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

19.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

20.

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

Child, Lydia M.

21.

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

22.

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

Weil, Simone

23.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

24.

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.

25.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

26.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

30.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

31.

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

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

34.

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

Lowell, James Russell

35.

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

36.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

37.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

38.

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

Stein, Gertrude

39.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

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

41.

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

Auden, W. H.

42.

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

Koestler, Arthur

43.

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

Heine, Heinrich

44.

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

Samuel Butler

45.

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

James, William

46.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

47.

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

48.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

49.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

50.

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

Welles, Orson