Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

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

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

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.

10.

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

Welles, Orson

11.

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.

12.

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

Auden, W. H.

13.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

17.

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

18.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

19.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

20.

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

Child, Lydia M.

21.

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

22.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

23.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

24.

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

25.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

26.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

Edgard Varese

31.

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.

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

Lewes, George Henry

35.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Hume, David

37.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

43.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

44.

Genius is independent of situation.