Motivational Quotes

Genius

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

- Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

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

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

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.

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Koestler, Arthur

12.

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

13.

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

Samuel Butler

14.

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

Pound, Ezra

15.

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

Wilde, Oscar

16.

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

Lowell, James Russell

17.

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

18.

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

Aragon, Louis

19.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

20.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

21.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

22.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

23.

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

24.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

25.

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

26.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

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

28.

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

Oscar Wilde

29.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

30.

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

31.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Edgard Varese

36.

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

Stein, Gertrude

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

40.

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

41.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

42.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

43.

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

William Hazlitt

44.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

45.

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

Oscar Levant

46.

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

47.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

48.

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

Stael, Germaine De

49.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

50.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.