Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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

Oscar Levant

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

Stael, Germaine De

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

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

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.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

15.

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

16.

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

Samuel Butler

17.

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

Wilde, Oscar

18.

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

19.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

20.

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

Hume, David

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

23.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

24.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

25.

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

Heine, Heinrich

26.

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

27.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

34.

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

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.

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

Stein, Gertrude

37.

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

Picasso, Pablo

38.

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

39.

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

Lewes, George Henry

40.

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

Oscar Wilde

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

43.

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

Weil, Simone

44.

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

45.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

46.

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.

47.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

48.

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

Ray, Man

49.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

50.

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