Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Auden, W. H.

Best Quotes about Genius

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

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

Ceran, C. W.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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.

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

Hume, David

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

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

Welles, Orson

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

Stael, Germaine De

10.

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

Lowell, James Russell

11.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

12.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

13.

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.

14.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

15.

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

Child, Lydia M.

16.

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

Stein, Gertrude

17.

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

Churchill, Winston

18.

The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.

Colton, Charles Caleb

19.

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

Picasso, Pablo

20.

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

21.

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

Pound, Ezra

22.

Who in the same given time can produce more than others has vigor; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

23.

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

24.

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

Oscar Levant

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Auden, W. H.

28.

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.

29.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

30.

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

31.

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

Oscar Wilde

32.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Samuel Butler

34.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

35.

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

36.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

39.

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

40.

One of the satisfactions of a genius is his will-power and obstinacy.

Ray, Man

41.

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

William Hazlitt

42.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

43.

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

44.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

45.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Koestler, Arthur

49.

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

Aragon, Louis

50.

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.