Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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

11.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

12.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

13.

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

Oscar Wilde

14.

Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

Weil, Simone

15.

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

16.

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

Oscar Levant

17.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

18.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

19.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

20.

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

Child, Lydia M.

21.

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

Stein, Gertrude

22.

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

23.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

24.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

25.

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

Koestler, Arthur

26.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

27.

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.

28.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

29.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

30.

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

31.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

32.

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.

33.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

35.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

36.

He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.

Robertson Davies

37.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

38.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

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

40.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

44.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

45.

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.

46.

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

James, William

47.

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

48.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

49.

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

50.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von