Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Stein, Gertrude

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

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

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

Ceran, C. W.

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

Stael, Germaine De

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

The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.

Colton, Charles Caleb

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

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

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

15.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

16.

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

17.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

Samuel Butler

20.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

21.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

22.

The first and last thing required of genius is, love of the truth.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

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

24.

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

25.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

It is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.

Picasso, Pablo

28.

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

29.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

30.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

31.

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

Oscar Levant

32.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

33.

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.

34.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

35.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

36.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

37.

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

38.

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

Child, Lydia M.

39.

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

Lewes, George Henry

40.

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

Welles, Orson

41.

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

James, William

42.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

43.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

44.

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

45.

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

Weil, Simone

46.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

47.

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

48.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

49.

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

50.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu