Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Best Quotes about Genius

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

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

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

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

Churchill, Winston

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

Samuel Butler

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

10.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

11.

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

12.

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

Koestler, Arthur

13.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

14.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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.

16.

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.

17.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

18.

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

Auden, W. H.

19.

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

20.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

21.

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

Picasso, Pablo

22.

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

23.

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

Wilde, Oscar

24.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

25.

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

Ray, Man

26.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

27.

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

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

Stael, Germaine De

29.

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

30.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

31.

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

32.

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

Welles, Orson

33.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

34.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

35.

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

36.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

37.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

40.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

41.

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

42.

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

Heine, Heinrich

43.

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

Ceran, C. W.

44.

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

Oscar Levant

45.

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

46.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

James, William