Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

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

Oscar Levant

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

Hume, David

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

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

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.

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Edison, Thomas A.

10.

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

11.

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

Koestler, Arthur

12.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

13.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

17.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

18.

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

Oscar Wilde

19.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

20.

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

Stael, Germaine De

21.

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

Samuel Butler

22.

As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius -- the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

23.

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

Wilde, Oscar

24.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

25.

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

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

27.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

29.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

30.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

31.

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

32.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

33.

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

34.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

35.

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

Lowell, James Russell

36.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

37.

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

38.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

39.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

40.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

41.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

42.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

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.

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.

45.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

William Hazlitt