Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Oscar Wilde

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

Stael, Germaine De

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enoughto think they can change the world
Are the ones who do.

Apple Computer

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

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

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

Hume, David

10.

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

Ray, Man

11.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

12.

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

13.

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

Stein, Gertrude

14.

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

Welles, Orson

15.

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

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.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

18.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

19.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

20.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

21.

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

22.

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

Churchill, Winston

23.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

24.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

25.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

26.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

27.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

28.

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

29.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

30.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

31.

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

Oscar Wilde

32.

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

33.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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.

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

Samuel Butler

36.

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

Aragon, Louis

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Oscar Levant

42.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

47.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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