Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Koestler, Arthur

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

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

Stael, Germaine De

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

Aragon, Louis

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

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

Welles, Orson

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

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

10.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

11.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

12.

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

13.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

14.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

15.

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

16.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

20.

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.

21.

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

Auden, W. H.

22.

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.

23.

The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.

Child, Lydia M.

24.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

25.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

26.

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

27.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

29.

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

Picasso, Pablo

30.

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

Weil, Simone

31.

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

Lowell, James Russell

32.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

33.

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

Hume, David

34.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

Oscar Levant

36.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

37.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

41.

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

42.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

43.

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.

44.

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

Wilde, Oscar

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

48.

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

49.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo