Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Hume, David

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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

William Hazlitt

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.

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

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

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

Ceran, C. W.

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

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

10.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

11.

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

12.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

13.

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

14.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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.

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

Ray, Man

17.

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.

18.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

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

20.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

21.

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.

22.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

Koestler, Arthur

24.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

25.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

26.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

27.

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

28.

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

Wilde, Oscar

29.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

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.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

36.

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

37.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

38.

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

39.

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

Child, Lydia M.

40.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

41.

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

Aragon, Louis

42.

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

Oscar Levant

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.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Stein, Gertrude

48.

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.

49.

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

Welles, Orson

50.

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