Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

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

Wilde, Oscar

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

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

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

Aragon, Louis

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

Weil, Simone

10.

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

11.

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

Koestler, Arthur

12.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

13.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

14.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

15.

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

Oscar Levant

16.

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

Ceran, C. W.

17.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

18.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Lewes, George Henry

25.

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

Ray, Man

26.

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

Stael, Germaine De

27.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

28.

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

29.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

30.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

31.

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

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Auden, W. H.

34.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

35.

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.

36.

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

Heine, Heinrich

37.

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

38.

Talent is a faculty that is highly developed, but genius commands all the faculties.

Hedge, Francis Herbert

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

42.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

43.

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

Picasso, Pablo

44.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

45.

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

Welles, Orson

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)