Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

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

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

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.

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

Welles, Orson

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

Wilde, Oscar

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.

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

Weil, Simone

10.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

11.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

13.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Stein, Gertrude

15.

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

Auden, W. H.

16.

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

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Churchill, Winston

19.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

22.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

Lowell, James Russell

24.

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

25.

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

Child, Lydia M.

26.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

27.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

28.

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

Heine, Heinrich

29.

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

Hume, David

30.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

31.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

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.

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

40.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

41.

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

Koestler, Arthur

42.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

43.

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

44.

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

Samuel Butler

45.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

46.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

47.

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

Edgard Varese

48.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

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

50.

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