Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Lewes, George Henry

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Oscar Wilde

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

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

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

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

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

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

Samuel Butler

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

10.

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

Oscar Levant

11.

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

12.

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

Auden, W. H.

13.

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.

14.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

15.

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

Heine, Heinrich

16.

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

Lewes, George Henry

17.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

22.

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

Hume, David

23.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

24.

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

Stein, Gertrude

25.

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

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 hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

28.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

29.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

30.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

31.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Edgard Varese

33.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

34.

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

Churchill, Winston

35.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

36.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

37.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

38.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

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

Picasso, Pablo

40.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

42.

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

43.

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

44.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

45.

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

Child, Lydia M.

46.

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

47.

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

Ceran, C. W.

48.

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

Pound, Ezra

49.

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

50.

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

Weil, Simone