Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Edison, Thomas A.

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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

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

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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

Oscar Levant

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.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

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

Churchill, Winston

10.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

12.

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

Edgard Varese

13.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

14.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

15.

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

Wilde, Oscar

16.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

18.

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

Stael, Germaine De

19.

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

Heine, Heinrich

20.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Lowell, James Russell

24.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

Weil, Simone

28.

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

Koestler, Arthur

29.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

30.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

31.

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

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

34.

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

35.

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

Ray, Man

36.

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

Welles, Orson

37.

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

Pound, Ezra

38.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

39.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

40.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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.

44.

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

Hume, David

45.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

47.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles