Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Best Quotes about Genius

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

Auden, W. H.

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.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

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

Ray, Man

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

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

Stein, Gertrude

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

Churchill, Winston

10.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

11.

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

12.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

13.

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

14.

Who in the same given time can produce more than others has vigor; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

15.

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

Child, Lydia M.

16.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

17.

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

Wilde, Oscar

18.

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

19.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

20.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

21.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

25.

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

26.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

27.

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

Ceran, C. W.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

William Hazlitt

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.

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

Koestler, Arthur

33.

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

34.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

35.

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

Pound, Ezra

36.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

37.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

James, William

41.

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

Hume, David

42.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

44.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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.

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

Samuel Butler

47.

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

Aragon, Louis

48.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

49.

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