Motivational Quotes

Genius

Genius is of no country.

- Charles Churchill

Best Quotes about Genius

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

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

Lewes, George Henry

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

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

Churchill, Winston

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

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

Oscar Levant

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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.

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

Welles, Orson

11.

Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitual way.

James, William

12.

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

William Hazlitt

13.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

14.

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

Oscar Wilde

15.

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

Heine, Heinrich

16.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Lowell, James Russell

18.

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

19.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

20.

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

Weil, Simone

21.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

22.

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

Stael, Germaine De

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

27.

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

28.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

29.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

30.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

31.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Edgard Varese

33.

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

Hume, David

34.

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

35.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

36.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

37.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

38.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

39.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

40.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

43.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

44.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

45.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

46.

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