Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Lewes, George Henry

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

James, William

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

Heine, Heinrich

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

10.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

11.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

12.

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

Ceran, C. W.

13.

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

Picasso, Pablo

14.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

15.

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

Churchill, Winston

16.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

17.

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

Stein, Gertrude

18.

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

Wilde, Oscar

19.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

20.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

24.

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

Aragon, Louis

25.

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

Hume, David

26.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

33.

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

Oscar Wilde

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

40.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

41.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

42.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

Child, Lydia M.

44.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

45.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

46.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

47.

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

48.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

49.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

50.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo