Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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.

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

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

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

William Hazlitt

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

Picasso, Pablo

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

Weil, Simone

10.

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.

11.

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

Edgard Varese

12.

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

Stein, Gertrude

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

16.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

17.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

18.

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

Oscar Levant

19.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

20.

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

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

23.

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.

24.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

26.

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

27.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

28.

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

29.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

30.

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

Stael, Germaine De

31.

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

32.

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

Child, Lydia M.

33.

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

Welles, Orson

34.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

35.

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

Lowell, James Russell

36.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

37.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

38.

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

Hume, David

39.

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

Churchill, Winston

40.

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

Oscar Wilde

41.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

Wilde, Oscar

43.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

44.

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

45.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

46.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

47.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

48.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

49.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

50.

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