Motivational Quotes

Genius

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

- Williams, Bern

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

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

Stael, Germaine De

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

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

10.

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

11.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

13.

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

Samuel Butler

14.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

15.

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.

16.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Stein, Gertrude

18.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

19.

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

20.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

21.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

26.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

27.

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

28.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

29.

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

Welles, Orson

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds.

Hume, David

36.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

37.

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

38.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

40.

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

41.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

42.

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

Ray, Man

43.

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

44.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

45.

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

46.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

47.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

48.

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

Child, Lydia M.

49.

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

50.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary