Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Welles, Orson

Best Quotes about Genius

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 no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

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.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

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

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Heine, Heinrich

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

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

10.

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

Lewes, George Henry

11.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

14.

Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

Weil, Simone

15.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

16.

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

17.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

18.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

19.

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

Auden, W. H.

20.

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

Oscar Wilde

21.

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

Picasso, Pablo

22.

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

Ray, Man

23.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

24.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

25.

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.

26.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

27.

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

28.

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

Child, Lydia M.

29.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

30.

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

Stein, Gertrude

31.

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

Edgard Varese

32.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

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

Lowell, James Russell

34.

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

Koestler, Arthur

35.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

36.

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

37.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

38.

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

39.

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

Churchill, Winston

40.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Welles, Orson

44.

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

45.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

50.

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