Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Erasmus, Desiderius

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Lowell, James Russell

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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

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

Stael, Germaine De

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

10.

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

Lewes, George Henry

11.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

12.

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

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

14.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

16.

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.

17.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

18.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

19.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

20.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

Wilde, Oscar

22.

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

Hume, David

23.

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

24.

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

Edgard Varese

25.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

26.

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

27.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

28.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Child, Lydia M.

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

Ray, Man

36.

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

37.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

38.

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

Weil, Simone

39.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

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

41.

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

James, William

42.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

43.

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

Welles, Orson

44.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

49.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

50.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic