Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Aragon, Louis

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

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

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

Aragon, Louis

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

Oscar Levant

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

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

10.

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

11.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

12.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

13.

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

14.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

15.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

16.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

17.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

18.

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

William Hazlitt

19.

I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.

Fuller, Buckminster

20.

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

21.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

22.

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

Pound, Ezra

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enoughto think they can change the world
Are the ones who do.

Apple Computer

27.

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

Heine, Heinrich

28.

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

29.

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

Oscar Wilde

30.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

Wilde, Oscar

35.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

37.

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

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.

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

40.

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

Lowell, James Russell

41.

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

Auden, W. H.

42.

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

43.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

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

Wilde, Oscar

45.

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.

46.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

47.

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

Ceran, C. W.

48.

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

49.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

50.

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