Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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.

10.

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

11.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

12.

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

Pound, Ezra

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

16.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

17.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

19.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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.

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

Picasso, Pablo

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.

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

24.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

25.

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

Churchill, Winston

26.

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

Samuel Butler

27.

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

28.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

29.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

30.

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

Hume, David

31.

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

Stael, Germaine De

32.

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

33.

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

Welles, Orson

34.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

35.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

Aragon, Louis

39.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

40.

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

41.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

42.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

43.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

44.

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

Lowell, James Russell

45.

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.

46.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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

Oscar Levant

48.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

49.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo