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

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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

Samuel Butler

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

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

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

Pound, Ezra

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.

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

Ray, Man

10.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

11.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

12.

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

Auden, W. H.

13.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

14.

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

15.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

16.

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

17.

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

Edgard Varese

18.

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

19.

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

Child, Lydia M.

20.

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

Lowell, James Russell

21.

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

22.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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.

24.

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

Heine, Heinrich

25.

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

Koestler, Arthur

26.

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

James, William

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

30.

Genius is, to be sure, not a matter of arbitrariness, but rather of freedom, just as wit, love, and faith, which once shall become arts and disciplines. We should demand genius from everybody, without, however, expecting it.

Schlegel, Friedrich

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.

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

34.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

35.

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

36.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

37.

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

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

40.

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

41.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

42.

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

Weil, Simone

43.

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

44.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

45.

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

Picasso, Pablo

46.

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.

47.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

48.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

50.

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

William Hazlitt