Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Auden, W. H.

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

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

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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 of no country.

Charles Churchill

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.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

11.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

12.

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

Oscar Levant

13.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

14.

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

Lewes, George Henry

15.

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

Heine, Heinrich

16.

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

Welles, Orson

17.

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.

18.

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.

19.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

20.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

21.

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

22.

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

Churchill, Winston

23.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

24.

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

25.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

26.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

Stein, Gertrude

31.

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

32.

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

33.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

34.

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

Weil, Simone

35.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

36.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

37.

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

38.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

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

40.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

41.

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

42.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

Oscar Wilde

45.

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

Edgard Varese

46.

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

Koestler, Arthur

47.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

48.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

Samuel Butler

50.

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