Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

William Hazlitt

Hamilton, Alexander

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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.

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

Oscar Wilde

10.

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

11.

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

Aragon, Louis

12.

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

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Ceran, C. W.

17.

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

18.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

19.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

20.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

21.

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

22.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

23.

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

24.

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

Heine, Heinrich

25.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

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

Hume, David

27.

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

Lowell, James Russell

28.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

29.

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

30.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

31.

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

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

34.

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

Stael, Germaine De

35.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.

Fuller, Buckminster

37.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

38.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

42.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Ray, Man

45.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

46.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

Churchill, Winston

48.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

49.

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

50.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor