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

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Oscar Levant

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Hubbard, Elbert

10.

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

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.

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

Welles, Orson

13.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

14.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

15.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

16.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

17.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

18.

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

19.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

23.

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

Wilde, Oscar

24.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

25.

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

Lewes, George Henry

26.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

27.

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

Pound, Ezra

28.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Ceran, C. W.

34.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

Ray, Man

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.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

38.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

39.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

40.

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

41.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

42.

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

43.

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

Samuel Butler

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

49.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

50.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern