Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Edison, Thomas A.

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Wilde, Oscar

Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature.

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

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

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

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

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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

10.

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

Churchill, Winston

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Koestler, Arthur

15.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

16.

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

Ceran, C. W.

17.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

18.

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

Auden, W. H.

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

22.

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

23.

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

Stael, Germaine De

24.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

25.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

29.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

30.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

31.

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.

32.

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

Ray, Man

33.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

34.

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

35.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

38.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

James, William

40.

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

41.

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

Aragon, Louis

42.

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

43.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

44.

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

Samuel Butler

45.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

46.

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

47.

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

Hume, David

48.

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

49.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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