Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Koestler, Arthur

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

James, William

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

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.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

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

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

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

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

Ray, Man

11.

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

Weil, Simone

12.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

13.

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

Oscar Wilde

14.

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

Koestler, Arthur

15.

Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.

Stael, Germaine De

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Stein, Gertrude

19.

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

Aragon, Louis

20.

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.

21.

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

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.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

24.

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

Welles, Orson

25.

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

26.

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

William Hazlitt

27.

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

28.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

29.

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.

30.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

31.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

32.

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.

Da Vinci, Leonardo

33.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

34.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

36.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

38.

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

Ceran, C. W.

39.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

40.

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

Churchill, Winston

41.

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

42.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

43.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

44.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

45.

Genius is the ability to act rightly without precedent -- the power to do the right thing the first time.