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

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

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

Ray, Man

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Samuel Butler

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

Oscar Levant

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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

Weil, Simone

11.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

12.

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

Edgard Varese

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

16.

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

17.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

18.

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

Koestler, Arthur

19.

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

20.

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

Churchill, Winston

21.

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

22.

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

Child, Lydia M.

23.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

24.

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

25.

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

Welles, Orson

26.

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

Pound, Ezra

27.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

28.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

29.

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

30.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

Hume, David

32.

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

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

35.

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

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Ceran, C. W.

38.

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

39.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

40.

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

41.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

42.

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

43.

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

Picasso, Pablo

44.

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

Stael, Germaine De

45.

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

46.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

47.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

48.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

49.

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.

50.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert