Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Dahlberg, Edward

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Aragon, Louis

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

Stein, Gertrude

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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

Welles, Orson

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

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

Auden, W. H.

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.

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

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

10.

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

Edgard Varese

11.

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

Ray, Man

12.

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

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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.

15.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

16.

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

Hume, David

17.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

18.

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

19.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Stael, Germaine De

21.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

23.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

24.

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

25.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

27.

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

28.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

29.

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

Child, Lydia M.

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

34.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

35.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

36.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

39.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

40.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Ceran, C. W.

44.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

45.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

49.

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

Lewes, George Henry

50.

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