Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Hume, David

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

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

Stael, Germaine De

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

Ray, Man

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

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

Oscar Levant

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

Welles, Orson

11.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

12.

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

Pound, Ezra

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

17.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

19.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

20.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

21.

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

Weil, Simone

22.

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

23.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

24.

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

25.

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

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

Ceran, C. W.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Stein, Gertrude

30.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

31.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

32.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

33.

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.

34.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

35.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

36.

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.

William Hazlitt

37.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

40.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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

Churchill, Winston

42.

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

Picasso, Pablo

43.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

44.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

45.

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

Aragon, Louis

46.

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

47.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

48.

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enoughto think they can change the world
Are the ones who do.

Apple Computer

49.

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

50.

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

Koestler, Arthur