Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Koestler, Arthur

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

William Hazlitt

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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

Stael, Germaine De

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Oscar Wilde

10.

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

11.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Picasso, Pablo

13.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

14.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

15.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

16.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

17.

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

18.

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

Hume, David

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

22.

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

23.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

24.

Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature.

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

25.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

26.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

27.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

33.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

34.

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

Pound, Ezra

35.

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

36.

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

Oscar Levant

37.

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

Edgard Varese

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

40.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

41.

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

42.

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

Stein, Gertrude

43.

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

44.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

45.

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

46.

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

James, William

47.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

48.

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

49.

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