Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Pound, Ezra

Best Quotes about Genius

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

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

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.

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

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

Oscar Levant

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

10.

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

Hume, David

11.

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.

12.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

13.

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

Ray, Man

14.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

15.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Woolf, Virginia

16.

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

Heine, Heinrich

17.

Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

18.

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

Weil, Simone

19.

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

William Hazlitt

20.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

27.

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

Stael, Germaine De

28.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

29.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

30.

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

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

Koestler, Arthur

33.

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

James, William

34.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

35.

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

Aragon, Louis

36.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

37.

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

38.

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

Edgard Varese

39.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

40.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

41.

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

Stein, Gertrude

42.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

43.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

44.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

45.

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

Lewes, George Henry

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

50.

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

Pound, Ezra