Motivational Quotes

Genius

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

- Hugo, Victor

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Oscar Levant

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.

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

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

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

Stael, Germaine De

11.

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

12.

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

Hume, David

13.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

14.

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

Ceran, C. W.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

18.

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.

19.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

20.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

21.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

22.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

23.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

26.

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

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.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

29.

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

30.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

Lewes, George Henry

32.

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

Oscar Wilde

33.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

34.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

35.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

36.

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

Picasso, Pablo

37.

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

38.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Welles, Orson

43.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

46.

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

Wilde, Oscar

47.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

48.

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

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.

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

Stein, Gertrude