Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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

William Hazlitt

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

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

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

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

Koestler, Arthur

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

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

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

10.

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

Oscar Levant

11.

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

James, William

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

Churchill, Winston

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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.

23.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

24.

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

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

Ray, Man

26.

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

27.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

28.

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

29.

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

Heine, Heinrich

30.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

31.

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

Picasso, Pablo

32.

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

Weil, Simone

33.

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

34.

A genius is one who can do anything except make a living.

Adams, Joey Lauren

35.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

37.

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

Pound, Ezra

38.

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

Ceran, C. W.

39.

Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders.

Erasmus, Desiderius

40.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

41.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

42.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

48.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

50.

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