Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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 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

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

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

Koestler, Arthur

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Heine, Heinrich

10.

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

11.

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

12.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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.

15.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Oscar Wilde

16.

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

17.

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

Wilde, Oscar

18.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

22.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

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

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

26.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

28.

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

29.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

30.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

31.

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

Welles, Orson

32.

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

33.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

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.

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

36.

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

Churchill, Winston

37.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

38.

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

Hume, David

39.

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

40.

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

Weil, Simone

41.

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

Picasso, Pablo

42.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

43.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

44.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

49.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

50.

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

Hubbard, Elbert