Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Ceran, C. W.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

There is one subtle but important difference between genius and stupidity and that is that genius has its limits. You'll see yourself clearest in the eyes of your friends.

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

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

Picasso, Pablo

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

10.

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

11.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

13.

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

James, William

14.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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.

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

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

Oscar Levant

20.

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

Lewes, George Henry

21.

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

Hume, David

22.

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

Child, Lydia M.

23.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

24.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

25.

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

Churchill, Winston

26.

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

27.

The first and last thing required of genius is, love of the truth.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

29.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

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.

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

Pound, Ezra

32.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

33.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

34.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

35.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

36.

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

37.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

38.

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

Stein, Gertrude

39.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

40.

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

41.

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

42.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

Weil, Simone

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.

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

William Hazlitt

46.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

47.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

48.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

49.

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.

50.

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