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 world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

Auden, W. H.

The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.

Trevor-Roper, H. R.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

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

Ray, Man

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

Heine, Heinrich

10.

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

Hume, David

11.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

13.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

17.

His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.

Edison, Thomas A.

18.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

19.

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

20.

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

Stein, Gertrude

21.

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

22.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

23.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

24.

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

25.

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

Lowell, James Russell

26.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

27.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

32.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

33.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

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.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

36.

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

Samuel Butler

37.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

40.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

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.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

43.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

Stael, Germaine De

46.

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

47.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

48.

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

49.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

50.

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

Picasso, Pablo