Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Erasmus, Desiderius

Best Quotes about Genius

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

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

Koestler, Arthur

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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

Churchill, Winston

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

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Dahlberg, Edward

10.

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

Aragon, Louis

11.

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

12.

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

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

15.

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

16.

I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.

Fuller, Buckminster

17.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

18.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

22.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

23.

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

Heine, Heinrich

24.

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

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

28.

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

Lewes, George Henry

29.

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

Welles, Orson

30.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

31.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

32.

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

Child, Lydia M.

33.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

34.

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

35.

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

Stein, Gertrude

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Lowell, James Russell

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.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Picasso, Pablo

45.

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.

46.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

48.

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

Oscar Levant

49.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

50.

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.