Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

The real people of genius were resolute workers not idle dreamers.

Lewes, George Henry

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Ray, Man

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.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

13.

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

Lowell, James Russell

14.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

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

Ceran, C. W.

16.

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

17.

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

William Hazlitt

18.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

20.

Joyce, James

21.

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

Child, Lydia M.

22.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

23.

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

Koestler, Arthur

24.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

25.

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

Oscar Levant

26.

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

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.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

29.

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

30.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

31.

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

32.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

33.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

34.

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

35.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

36.

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

Stael, Germaine De

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.

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

39.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

40.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

41.

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

42.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius -- the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

45.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

46.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

47.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

48.

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.

49.

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

Wilde, Oscar

50.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John