Motivational Quotes

Genius

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.

Best Quotes about Genius

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Dahlberg, Edward

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

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

Edison, Thomas A.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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

Aragon, Louis

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.

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

James, William

10.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

11.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

12.

Who in the same given time can produce more than others has vigor; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

13.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

14.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

15.

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

Auden, W. H.

16.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

17.

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

Samuel Butler

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Churchill, Winston

21.

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

Heine, Heinrich

22.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

23.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

24.

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

Oscar Levant

25.

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.

26.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

29.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

30.

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

Oscar Wilde

31.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

32.

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

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

35.

I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.

Fuller, Buckminster

36.

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

37.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

41.

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

42.

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

Stael, Germaine De

43.

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

45.

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

46.

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

Stein, Gertrude

47.

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

William Hazlitt

48.

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

Lowell, James Russell

49.

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