Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Aragon, Louis

Best Quotes about Genius

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Hume, David

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Samuel Butler

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

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

Oscar Wilde

10.

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

Heine, Heinrich

11.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

12.

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enoughto think they can change the world
Are the ones who do.

Apple Computer

13.

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

Ceran, C. W.

14.

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

Weil, Simone

15.

The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

Koestler, Arthur

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.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

18.

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.

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

21.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

22.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

Pound, Ezra

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

28.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

29.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

30.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

36.

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.

37.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

38.

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

Auden, W. H.

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

Oscar Levant

42.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

43.

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

Lowell, James Russell

44.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

45.

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

46.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

47.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

48.

Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have is this. When I have a subject in mind. I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it... the effort which I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.

Hamilton, Alexander

49.

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

Picasso, Pablo

50.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle