Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Edison, Thomas A.

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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

Edgard Varese

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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

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

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

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

10.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

11.

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

Lewes, George Henry

12.

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

13.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

14.

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

Ray, Man

15.

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

Lowell, James Russell

16.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

17.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

18.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

19.

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

Picasso, Pablo

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

24.

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

Aragon, Louis

25.

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

26.

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

William Hazlitt

27.

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

James, William

28.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

29.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

30.

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

31.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

32.

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.

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

35.

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

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.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

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

Oscar Levant

39.

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

40.

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

Koestler, Arthur

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Hume, David

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Heine, Heinrich

47.

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

Samuel Butler

48.

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

49.

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

Churchill, Winston

50.

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