Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Erasmus, Desiderius

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Weil, Simone

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

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

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

Geniuses themselves don't talk about the gift of genius, they just talk about hard work and long hours.

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

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

Dahlberg, Edward

10.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Welles, Orson

12.

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.

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.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

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

16.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

17.

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

James, William

18.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

19.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

20.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

21.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

22.

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

Stein, Gertrude

23.

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

24.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

25.

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

Lowell, James Russell

26.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

29.

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

Heine, Heinrich

30.

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

Churchill, Winston

31.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

32.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

Stael, Germaine De

35.

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

Aragon, Louis

36.

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

37.

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

Pound, Ezra

38.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

39.

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

40.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

41.

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

42.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Picasso, Pablo

45.

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

46.

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

Ceran, C. W.

47.

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

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.

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

50.

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

Ray, Man