Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Koestler, Arthur

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Edgard Varese

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

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

Picasso, Pablo

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.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

10.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

11.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

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

13.

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

Pound, Ezra

14.

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

Ceran, C. W.

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

Lowell, James Russell

18.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

19.

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

20.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

21.

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

22.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

25.

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

James, William

26.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

27.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

28.

Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds.

Samuel Butler

29.

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

30.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

31.

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

Child, Lydia M.

32.

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

William Hazlitt

33.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

34.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

35.

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

Welles, Orson

36.

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

Weil, Simone

37.

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

38.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Oscar Levant

40.

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

41.

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

Hume, David

42.

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.

43.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

44.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

45.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

47.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

48.

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

49.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

50.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert