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

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

Hume, David

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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

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

Edgard Varese

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

10.

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

11.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

12.

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

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

James, William

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

17.

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

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, 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

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.

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

Oscar Wilde

22.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

23.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

24.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

25.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

26.

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

27.

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

Welles, Orson

28.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

29.

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

30.

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

Picasso, Pablo

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

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

35.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

36.

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

Ray, Man

37.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

39.

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

Stein, Gertrude

40.

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

Child, Lydia M.

41.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

42.

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

43.

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

Aragon, Louis

44.

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

Samuel Butler

45.

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

Lewes, George Henry

46.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

47.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

48.

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.

49.

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

Koestler, Arthur

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