Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Picasso, Pablo

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Ray, Man

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

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

Samuel Butler

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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

Picasso, Pablo

10.

Everybody denies I am a genius --but nobody ever called me one!

Welles, Orson

11.

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

Child, Lydia M.

12.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

15.

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

Hume, David

16.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

17.

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

Koestler, Arthur

18.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

19.

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

20.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

21.

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

Lewes, George Henry

22.

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.

23.

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

Weil, Simone

24.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

26.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

27.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

28.

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

Lowell, James Russell

29.

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

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 divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

32.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

33.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

39.

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.

40.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

41.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

42.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

43.

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

Auden, W. H.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Aragon, Louis

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

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

Oscar Levant

49.

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

50.

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