Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- William Hazlitt

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Child, Lydia M.

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

Picasso, Pablo

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

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

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

Churchill, Winston

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

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.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

10.

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

11.

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

12.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

13.

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

Aragon, Louis

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

Heine, Heinrich

17.

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

18.

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

Lowell, James Russell

19.

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

Auden, W. H.

20.

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

21.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

22.

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

23.

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

William Hazlitt

24.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

25.

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

James, William

26.

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

Stein, Gertrude

27.

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

28.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

32.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

33.

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

Koestler, Arthur

34.

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

35.

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

Oscar Levant

36.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

37.

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

38.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

39.

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

40.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

41.

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

Ceran, C. W.

42.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Hume, David

45.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

46.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

47.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass spoil a draught of fair water.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

50.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca