Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.

Edgard Varese

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

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

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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

Ray, Man

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

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

10.

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.

11.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

12.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

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

Hume, David

14.

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

Auden, W. H.

15.

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

Welles, Orson

16.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

17.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

18.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

19.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

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

Pound, Ezra

21.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

22.

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

23.

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

Oscar Levant

24.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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.

26.

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

William Hazlitt

27.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

29.

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

30.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

31.

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

32.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

33.

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

Lewes, George Henry

34.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

35.

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.

Heine, Heinrich

36.

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

37.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

38.

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

39.

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

James, William

40.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

41.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

42.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

43.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

44.

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.

45.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

46.

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

Lowell, James Russell

47.

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

48.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

49.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

50.

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