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

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

Oscar Wilde

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.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

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

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.

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

Edgard Varese

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

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

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

11.

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

12.

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

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

14.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

15.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

16.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Genius is the ability to act rightly without precedent -- the power to do the right thing the first time.

Hubbard, Elbert

20.

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

21.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

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

Ray, Man

23.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

24.

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

25.

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

William Hazlitt

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.

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

Lowell, James Russell

28.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

30.

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

Ceran, C. W.

31.

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

Child, Lydia M.

32.

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

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

Oscar Levant

35.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

36.

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.

37.

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

Heine, Heinrich

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Lewes, George Henry

41.

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

42.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

43.

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

44.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

45.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

46.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

47.

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