Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Churchill, Winston

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

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

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

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

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Ceran, C. W.

14.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.

Edgard Varese

16.

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

17.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

18.

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

Pound, Ezra

19.

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

20.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

21.

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

Oscar Levant

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Aragon, Louis

27.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

28.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

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.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

32.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

33.

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

34.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

35.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

36.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

37.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

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

Ray, Man

39.

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

40.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Picasso, Pablo

44.

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

Samuel Butler

45.

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

Lowell, James Russell

46.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

47.

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

Weil, Simone

48.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

49.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

50.

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.