Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Welles, Orson

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

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

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

Weil, Simone

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

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

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

Edgard Varese

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

10.

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

Ray, Man

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

15.

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

Heine, Heinrich

16.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

17.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

18.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

19.

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

20.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

24.

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

Pound, Ezra

25.

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

26.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

27.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

28.

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.

29.

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.

30.

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

Auden, W. H.

31.

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

32.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

33.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

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

Ceran, C. W.

35.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

37.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

38.

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.

39.

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

Stael, Germaine De

40.

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

41.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

42.

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

Picasso, Pablo

43.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

44.

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

Child, Lydia M.

45.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

46.

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

47.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

48.

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

49.

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

Samuel Butler

50.

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