Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

Best Quotes about Genius

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

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

Edison, Thomas A.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

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

Pound, Ezra

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

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

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

Stein, Gertrude

True genius sees with the eyes of a child and thinks with the brain of a genius.

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

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

10.

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

11.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

12.

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

Weil, Simone

13.

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

14.

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

Oscar Levant

15.

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

Wilde, Oscar

16.

Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.

Ceran, C. W.

17.

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

Wilde, Oscar

18.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

19.

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.

20.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

21.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

22.

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

23.

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

Oscar Wilde

24.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

25.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

26.

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

27.

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

Picasso, Pablo

28.

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

Churchill, Winston

29.

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

Ray, Man

30.

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.

31.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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.

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.

William Hazlitt

34.

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

35.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

36.

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

Koestler, Arthur

37.

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

Edgard Varese

38.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

39.

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

40.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

41.

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

Hume, David

42.

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

Lewes, George Henry

43.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

44.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

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

47.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

48.

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

Samuel Butler

49.

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

50.

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