Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Heine, Heinrich

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

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.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Oscar Levant

10.

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

Oscar Wilde

11.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

12.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

14.

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enoughto think they can change the world
Are the ones who do.

Apple Computer

15.

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

16.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

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.

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

Stael, Germaine De

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

21.

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

Stein, Gertrude

22.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

23.

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

William Hazlitt

24.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

25.

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

Aragon, Louis

26.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

27.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

28.

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

Weil, Simone

29.

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

30.

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

Wilde, Oscar

31.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Edgard Varese

33.

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

Hume, David

34.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

35.

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

James, William

36.

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

37.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

38.

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

39.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

44.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

45.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

48.

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

Churchill, Winston

49.

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

50.

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.