Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Amiel, Henri Frederic

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Welles, Orson

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

Oscar Wilde

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

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

Weil, Simone

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

Heine, Heinrich

10.

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

Koestler, Arthur

11.

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

12.

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

Stein, Gertrude

13.

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

Pound, Ezra

14.

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

15.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

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

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.

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.

19.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

20.

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

Oscar Levant

21.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

22.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

24.

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

Stael, Germaine De

25.

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.

26.

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

Child, Lydia M.

27.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

28.

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

29.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

30.

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

Samuel Butler

31.

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

32.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

33.

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

34.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

35.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

36.

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

37.

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

Lewes, George Henry

38.

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

Auden, W. H.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

Ceran, C. W.

45.

Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.

Dahlberg, Edward

46.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

47.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

48.

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

49.

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

Wilde, Oscar

50.

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