Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Amiel, Henri Frederic

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

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

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

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.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

Auden, W. H.

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

10.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

11.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Oscar Levant

15.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

16.

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

17.

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

Aragon, Louis

18.

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

19.

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

Oscar Wilde

20.

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

Samuel Butler

21.

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

Wilde, Oscar

22.

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

23.

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

Heine, Heinrich

24.

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

25.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

29.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

30.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

31.

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

32.

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

Picasso, Pablo

33.

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

34.

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

Stein, Gertrude

35.

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.

36.

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.

37.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

38.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

39.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

40.

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

41.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

42.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

43.

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

Lewes, George Henry

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

47.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

48.

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

49.

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

Wilde, Oscar

50.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett