Motivational Quotes

Genius

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

- Lund, Robert S.

Best Quotes about Genius

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

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.

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

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.

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.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

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

Wilde, Oscar

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

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

Auden, W. H.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

13.

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

Samuel Butler

14.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

15.

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

16.

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

Ray, Man

17.

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

Weil, Simone

18.

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

Oscar Wilde

19.

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

20.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

21.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

22.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

23.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

24.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

33.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

34.

Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.

Stael, Germaine De

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police.

Joyce, James

38.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

39.

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

40.

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

Picasso, Pablo

41.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

Churchill, Winston

43.

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

Lowell, James Russell

44.

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

Edgard Varese

45.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

46.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

47.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

48.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

49.

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

50.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert