Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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.

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

Klee, Paul

11.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

12.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

13.

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

Auden, W. H.

14.

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

15.

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

Ceran, C. W.

16.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

17.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

19.

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

Picasso, Pablo

20.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

21.

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.

22.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

23.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

24.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

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

Stael, Germaine De

29.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

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

Lowell, James Russell

31.

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

32.

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

33.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

34.

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

Wilde, Oscar

35.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

36.

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

37.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

38.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

39.

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

Edgard Varese

40.

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

41.

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

Adams, Joey Lauren

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

46.

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

Hume, David

47.

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

Lewes, George Henry

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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