Motivational Quotes

Genius

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

- Williams, Bern

Best Quotes about Genius

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.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Oscar Levant

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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

10.

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

11.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

12.

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

Weil, Simone

13.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Carl Sagan

17.

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.

18.

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

Churchill, Winston

19.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

20.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

21.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

22.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

23.

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

Wilde, Oscar

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

Hume, David

26.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

27.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

35.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

36.

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

Lowell, James Russell

37.

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

Pound, Ezra

38.

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

William Hazlitt

39.

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

Lewes, George Henry

40.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

41.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

42.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

43.

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

44.

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

Stein, Gertrude

45.

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

Samuel Butler

46.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

47.

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