Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Pound, Ezra

Best Quotes about Genius

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.

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

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

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

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

Samuel Butler

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

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

13.

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

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

15.

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

William Hazlitt

16.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

17.

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

18.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

19.

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

Wilde, Oscar

20.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

21.

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

Lewes, George Henry

22.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Oscar Levant

27.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

28.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

29.

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

30.

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

Welles, Orson

31.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

32.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

33.

To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

34.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

35.

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.

36.

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

Koestler, Arthur

37.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

38.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

42.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

43.

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

Weil, Simone

44.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

45.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

46.

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

Hume, David

47.

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

Pound, Ezra

48.

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

49.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

50.

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

Edgard Varese