Motivational Quotes

Genius

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.

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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.

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

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

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 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

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Heine, Heinrich

12.

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

Lowell, James Russell

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.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

15.

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

Child, Lydia M.

16.

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

Stein, Gertrude

17.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

18.

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

Picasso, Pablo

19.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

24.

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

25.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

26.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

27.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

28.

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.

29.

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

Lewes, George Henry

30.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

31.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

32.

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

33.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

34.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

35.

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

36.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

37.

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

Koestler, Arthur

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.

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

40.

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

Oscar Levant

41.

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

42.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

43.

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

44.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

45.

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

William Hazlitt

46.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

47.

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