Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

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

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Ray, Man

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

Stein, Gertrude

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

10.

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

James, William

11.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

13.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

14.

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

Welles, Orson

15.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Weil, Simone

20.

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

Lowell, James Russell

21.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

22.

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

23.

The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.

Trevor-Roper, H. R.

24.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

25.

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

Oscar Wilde

26.

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

Lewes, George Henry

27.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

28.

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

Aragon, Louis

29.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

30.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

31.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

32.

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

33.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

34.

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

35.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

36.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

37.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

38.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

39.

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.

40.

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

Heine, Heinrich

41.

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

42.

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

William Hazlitt

43.

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

Samuel Butler

44.

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

45.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

46.

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

47.

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

Picasso, Pablo

48.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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