Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Child, Lydia M.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

10.

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

Hume, David

11.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

12.

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

13.

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

Stein, Gertrude

14.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

15.

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

Picasso, Pablo

16.

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

Lowell, James Russell

17.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

18.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

19.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

Aragon, Louis

27.

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

28.

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

Auden, W. H.

29.

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.

30.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

32.

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

Pound, Ezra

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

35.

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

36.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

37.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

38.

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

39.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

40.

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

41.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

42.

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

Lewes, George Henry

43.

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Edison, Thomas A.

44.

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

Churchill, Winston

45.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

46.

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

47.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

Weil, Simone

49.

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

50.

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