Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Holland, Josiah Gilbert

Best Quotes about Genius

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

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

Welles, Orson

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.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

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.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

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.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

11.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

12.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

13.

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

14.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

15.

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

16.

To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

17.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

18.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

19.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

20.

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

21.

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

Stael, Germaine De

22.

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

Lowell, James Russell

23.

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

James, William

24.

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

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

Wilde, Oscar

26.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

27.

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

28.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Woolf, Virginia

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.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

Koestler, Arthur

32.

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

Auden, W. H.

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 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.

35.

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

Heine, Heinrich

36.

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

Aragon, Louis

37.

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.

38.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

39.

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

Oscar Levant

40.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

41.

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.

42.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

43.

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

44.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

45.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

46.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

Hume, David

48.

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

49.

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

Ray, Man

50.

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