Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

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

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

10.

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

Ceran, C. W.

11.

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

Edgard Varese

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

William Hazlitt

14.

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

James, William

15.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

16.

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

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.

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

19.

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

Stael, Germaine De

20.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

21.

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

22.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

24.

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.

25.

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

Weil, Simone

26.

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

27.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

28.

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

Welles, Orson

29.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

30.

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

Pound, Ezra

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

33.

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

34.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

35.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

36.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

37.

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.

38.

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

Auden, W. H.

39.

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

Churchill, Winston

40.

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

41.

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

Aragon, Louis

42.

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

43.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

44.

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

Lewes, George Henry

45.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

46.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

50.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle