Motivational Quotes

Genius

Accept your genius and say what you think.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

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

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

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

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.

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

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

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

William Hazlitt

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

10.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

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

12.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

13.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

14.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

15.

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

16.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

17.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

18.

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

Pound, Ezra

19.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

20.

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

Child, Lydia M.

21.

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

Welles, Orson

22.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

23.

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

24.

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.

25.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

30.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

31.

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

Hume, David

32.

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

33.

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

Edgard Varese

34.

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

35.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Weil, Simone

38.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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.

40.

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

Auden, W. H.

41.

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

Samuel Butler

42.

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

Oscar Levant

43.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

44.

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

45.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

46.

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

47.

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

Lewes, George Henry

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.

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

50.

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