Motivational Quotes

Genius

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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

Edgard Varese

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Picasso, Pablo

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

Samuel Butler

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

Lewes, George Henry

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

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

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

10.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

11.

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

Welles, Orson

12.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

13.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

14.

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

Churchill, Winston

15.

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

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

18.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

19.

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

Oscar Levant

20.

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.

21.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

26.

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

27.

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

Koestler, Arthur

28.

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

29.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

30.

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

Stael, Germaine De

31.

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.

32.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Weil, Simone

36.

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

Lowell, James Russell

37.

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

38.

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

Child, Lydia M.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

42.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

43.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

44.

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

45.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Oscar Wilde

46.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

47.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

48.

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

Hume, David

49.

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

50.

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

Stein, Gertrude