Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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

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

Child, Lydia M.

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

10.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

11.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

12.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

13.

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

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

16.

Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have is this. When I have a subject in mind. I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it... the effort which I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.

Hamilton, Alexander

17.

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

Welles, Orson

18.

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.

19.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

20.

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

21.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

22.

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

23.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

24.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

26.

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

Edgard Varese

27.

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

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 is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

30.

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

Picasso, Pablo

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

33.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

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

35.

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

Oscar Wilde

36.

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

37.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

38.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

39.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

40.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

41.

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.

42.

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

Aragon, Louis

43.

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

44.

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

Koestler, Arthur

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

49.

Geniuses themselves don't talk about the gift of genius, they just talk about hard work and long hours.

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

50.

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