Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

10.

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

Child, Lydia M.

11.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

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

Welles, Orson

14.

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

James, William

15.

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

16.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

17.

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

18.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

19.

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

Aragon, Louis

20.

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

Ray, Man

21.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

22.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

23.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

24.

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

25.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

26.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

27.

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

Koestler, Arthur

28.

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

29.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

30.

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

Weil, Simone

31.

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

32.

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

33.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Heine, Heinrich

35.

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.

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

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

38.

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

Churchill, Winston

39.

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

40.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

42.

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

Stein, Gertrude

43.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Oscar Wilde

45.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

46.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

47.

I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.

Fuller, Buckminster

48.

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

Pound, Ezra

49.

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

50.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child