Motivational Quotes

Genius

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

- Hugo, Victor

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Hume, David

Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds.

Samuel Butler

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

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.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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

10.

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.

11.

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

Auden, W. H.

12.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

14.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

15.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

16.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

20.

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

21.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

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

Aragon, Louis

23.

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

24.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

25.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

26.

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

Heine, Heinrich

27.

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

28.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

29.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

30.

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

Weil, Simone

31.

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

Child, Lydia M.

32.

I really cannot know whether I am or am not the Genius you are pleased to call me, but I am very willing to put up with the mistake, if it be one. It is a title dearly enough bought by most men, to render it endurable, even when not quite clearly made out, which it never can be till the Posterity, whose decisions are merely dreams to ourselves, has sanctioned or denied it, while it can touch us no further.

Byron, Lord

33.

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

Ceran, C. W.

34.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

35.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

39.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

40.

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

Welles, Orson

41.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

Lowell, James Russell

46.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

Oscar Levant

50.

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