Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

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

Churchill, Winston

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Hume, David

10.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

11.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

13.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

14.

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

15.

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

Child, Lydia M.

16.

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

Lowell, James Russell

17.

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

Wilde, Oscar

18.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

19.

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

20.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

21.

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

Ray, Man

22.

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

23.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

24.

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

Weil, Simone

25.

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

26.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

28.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

29.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

30.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

32.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

33.

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.

34.

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.

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.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

Klee, Paul

38.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

39.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

40.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

46.

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

Koestler, Arthur

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Lewes, George Henry