Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Child, Lydia M.

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

Pound, Ezra

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.

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

Talent is a faculty that is highly developed, but genius commands all the faculties.

Hedge, Francis Herbert

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

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

Weil, Simone

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

10.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

11.

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

Edgard Varese

12.

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

Lewes, George Henry

13.

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

Koestler, Arthur

14.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

15.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

16.

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

Hume, David

17.

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

Oscar Levant

18.

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

19.

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.

William Hazlitt

20.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Lowell, James Russell

24.

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

Wilde, Oscar

25.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

27.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

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.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Stein, Gertrude

33.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

34.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

35.

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.

36.

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.

37.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

38.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

39.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

41.

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

Aragon, Louis

42.

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

Oscar Wilde

43.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

44.

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

Churchill, Winston

45.

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

46.

Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.

Ceran, C. W.

47.

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

48.

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

Samuel Butler

49.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

50.

What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea -- possessing them -- that what has been said has still not been said enough.

Delacroix, Eugene