Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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.

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

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

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

10.

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

Pound, Ezra

11.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

12.

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

13.

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

14.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

Oscar Wilde

16.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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

Weil, Simone

20.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

21.

Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.

Dahlberg, Edward

22.

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

Koestler, Arthur

23.

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

24.

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

Ceran, C. W.

25.

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

Ray, Man

26.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Stael, Germaine De

31.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

32.

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

James, William

33.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

34.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

35.

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

36.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

38.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

39.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

Lewes, George Henry

41.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

42.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

43.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

44.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

45.

The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.

Child, Lydia M.

46.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

47.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

48.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

49.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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