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

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

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

Oscar Wilde

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

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.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

Welles, Orson

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

10.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

Churchill, Winston

11.

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

Ceran, C. W.

12.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

13.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

14.

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

15.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

16.

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

17.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

18.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

19.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

20.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

21.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Koestler, Arthur

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

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.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

34.

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

Weil, Simone

35.

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

Picasso, Pablo

36.

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

37.

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

Pound, Ezra

38.

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

39.

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

Wilde, Oscar

41.

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

William Hazlitt

42.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

43.

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

44.

Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.

Edgard Varese

45.

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

46.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

47.

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

Aragon, Louis

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.

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

Oscar Levant

50.

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