Motivational Quotes

Genius

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

- Nabokov, Vladimir

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

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

Churchill, Winston

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

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

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

10.

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

Oscar Levant

11.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

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

James, William

17.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

20.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Lowell, James Russell

24.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

28.

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

Stael, Germaine De

29.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

30.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

31.

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

Hume, David

32.

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

Oscar Wilde

33.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

34.

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

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.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

37.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

38.

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

39.

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

Aragon, Louis

40.

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

Weil, Simone

41.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

42.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

44.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

45.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

46.

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

Lewes, George Henry

47.

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