Motivational Quotes

Genius

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

- Hugo, Victor

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

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

Auden, W. H.

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.

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

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

11.

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

Churchill, Winston

12.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

13.

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

Heine, Heinrich

14.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

15.

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

Ray, Man

16.

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

17.

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

Oscar Wilde

18.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

19.

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

William Hazlitt

20.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Edgard Varese

26.

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

Hume, David

27.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

28.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

29.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Stein, Gertrude

36.

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

37.

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

Koestler, Arthur

38.

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

39.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

40.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

41.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

42.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

43.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

44.

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

45.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

46.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

47.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.