Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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

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

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.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

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

Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitual way.

James, William

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

10.

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

Aragon, Louis

11.

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.

12.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

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

14.

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

Wilde, Oscar

15.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

16.

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.

William Hazlitt

17.

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

Samuel Butler

18.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

19.

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

Lowell, James Russell

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

22.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

23.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

24.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

25.

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

Stael, Germaine De

26.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

27.

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

28.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

29.

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

Ray, Man

30.

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.

31.

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

Stein, Gertrude

32.

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

Heine, Heinrich

33.

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

Edgard Varese

34.

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

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

37.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

38.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

39.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

40.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

41.

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

Ceran, C. W.

42.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

43.

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

Oscar Levant

44.

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

45.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

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

47.

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.

Beauvoir, Simone De

48.

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

Auden, W. H.

49.

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.

50.

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