Motivational Quotes

Genius

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.

Best Quotes about Genius

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

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

William Hazlitt

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

Fuller, Buckminster

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

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

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

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

Lewes, George Henry

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

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

10.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

11.

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.

12.

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

Weil, Simone

13.

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

Hume, David

14.

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

Koestler, Arthur

15.

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

16.

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

Auden, W. H.

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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

Pound, Ezra

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Oscar Levant

23.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

25.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

31.

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

32.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

36.

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

37.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

38.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

James, William

41.

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

Oscar Wilde

42.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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.

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.

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

48.

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

49.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

50.

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