Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Welles, Orson

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Child, Lydia M.

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

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

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

Stein, Gertrude

11.

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

Wilde, Oscar

12.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

13.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

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

15.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

16.

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

17.

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

Lewes, George Henry

18.

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

Oscar Levant

19.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

25.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

26.

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

Oscar Wilde

27.

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

28.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

29.

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

William Hazlitt

30.

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

Calvino, Italo

31.

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

32.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

33.

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

34.

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

James, William

35.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

36.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

37.

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

Churchill, Winston

38.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

39.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

40.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

41.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

42.

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

Heine, Heinrich

43.

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

Picasso, Pablo

44.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

45.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

46.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

48.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

49.

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

50.

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