Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Oscar Wilde

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

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

Lewes, George Henry

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

Koestler, Arthur

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

Auden, W. H.

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

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.

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

10.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

11.

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

William Hazlitt

12.

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

13.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

14.

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

15.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

Stael, Germaine De

17.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

18.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

19.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

20.

It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.

Lowell, James Russell

21.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

22.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

23.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Heine, Heinrich

27.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

28.

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

29.

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

Stein, Gertrude

30.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

32.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

35.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

36.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

37.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

38.

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

Oscar Levant

39.

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

40.

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

Wilde, Oscar

41.

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

42.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

43.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

44.

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

James, William

45.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

46.

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

Welles, Orson

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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

Samuel Butler