Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

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

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

Oscar Wilde

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

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

Lewes, George Henry

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

Hume, David

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

Lowell, James Russell

10.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

11.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

12.

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

Ray, Man

13.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

14.

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

Weil, Simone

15.

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

16.

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

Koestler, Arthur

17.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

20.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

21.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

22.

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

23.

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

Stein, Gertrude

24.

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

Welles, Orson

25.

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

Picasso, Pablo

26.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

27.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

28.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

29.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Edgard Varese

31.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

32.

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.

33.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

34.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

38.

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

39.

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

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.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

46.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

47.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

49.

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

50.

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

Dahlberg, Edward