Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

1.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

2.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

3.

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

Heine, Heinrich

4.

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

Welles, Orson

5.

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

6.

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

7.

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

8.

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

9.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

10.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

11.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

12.

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

Picasso, Pablo

13.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

14.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

15.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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.

17.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

19.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

20.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

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.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

23.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

24.

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

Ceran, C. W.

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

28.

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.

29.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

30.

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

Child, Lydia M.

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

33.

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

34.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

36.

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

Auden, W. H.

37.

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

Aragon, Louis

38.

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

Samuel Butler

39.

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

Pound, Ezra

40.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

41.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

42.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

44.

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

Ray, Man

45.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

46.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

47.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Lowell, James Russell