Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Beauvoir, Simone De

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Churchill, Winston

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

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

Stein, Gertrude

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

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

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

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

10.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

11.

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

Edgard Varese

12.

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

Weil, Simone

13.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

14.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

23.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

24.

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

25.

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

Auden, W. H.

26.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

27.

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

28.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

29.

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

Hume, David

30.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

31.

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

Lewes, George Henry

32.

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

33.

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

Aragon, Louis

34.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

35.

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

36.

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

William Hazlitt

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.

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

Oscar Levant

39.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

40.

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

James, William

41.

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

Heine, Heinrich

42.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

43.

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

Picasso, Pablo

44.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

45.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

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

47.

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

Oscar Wilde

48.

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

Stael, Germaine De

49.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

50.

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