Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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.

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

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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

William Hazlitt

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

10.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

11.

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

Welles, Orson

12.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

13.

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

Ray, Man

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.

Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

16.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

17.

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

Aragon, Louis

18.

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

Heine, Heinrich

19.

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

Koestler, Arthur

20.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

21.

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

22.

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

Oscar Levant

23.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

24.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

25.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

26.

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

James, William

27.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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 public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Oscar Wilde

30.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

31.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

32.

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

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

Pound, Ezra

43.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

44.

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

45.

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

Picasso, Pablo

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

50.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren