Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Child, Lydia M.

Best Quotes about Genius

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Weil, Simone

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

William Hazlitt

10.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

11.

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

Stael, Germaine De

12.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Oscar Levant

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Picasso, Pablo

19.

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

Aragon, Louis

20.

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

21.

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

Oscar Wilde

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.

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

24.

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

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.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Lewes, George Henry

31.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

32.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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.

36.

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

Ray, Man

37.

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.

38.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

39.

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

Auden, W. H.

40.

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

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

James, William

43.

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

Hume, David

44.

What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea -- possessing them -- that what has been said has still not been said enough.

Delacroix, Eugene

45.

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

Stein, Gertrude

46.

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

47.

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

Churchill, Winston

48.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

49.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

50.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.