Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

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.

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Edgard Varese

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

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

William Hazlitt

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

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

Stein, Gertrude

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

Pound, Ezra

11.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

12.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

13.

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

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.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

16.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

17.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

20.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

21.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

22.

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

23.

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

Koestler, Arthur

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

28.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Auden, W. H.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

Samuel Butler

40.

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

41.

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

Heine, Heinrich

42.

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.

43.

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.

44.

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

Aragon, Louis

45.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

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.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.