Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Heine, Heinrich

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

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

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

Lewes, George Henry

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

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

Picasso, Pablo

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

10.

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

11.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

13.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

14.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

16.

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

17.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

18.

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

19.

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

Child, Lydia M.

20.

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

Stein, Gertrude

21.

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

Oscar Wilde

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

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

Ray, Man

26.

True genius sees with the eyes of a child and thinks with the brain of a genius.

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

27.

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

Churchill, Winston

28.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Weil, Simone

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

34.

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

35.

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

Hume, David

36.

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

37.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

38.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

39.

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

Pound, Ezra

40.

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

41.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

Koestler, Arthur

43.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

44.

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

Edgard Varese

45.

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

Wilde, Oscar

46.

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.

47.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

48.

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

49.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

50.

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

Lowell, James Russell