Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Ceran, C. W.

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

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

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

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

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

Edison, Thomas A.

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.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

10.

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

Heine, Heinrich

11.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

12.

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.

Williams, Bern

13.

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

Hume, David

14.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

15.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

16.

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.

17.

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

Aragon, Louis

18.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Seneca

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

21.

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

James, William

22.

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

Edgard Varese

23.

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

24.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

29.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

30.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

Genius is sorrow's child.

Adams, John

34.

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

Weil, Simone

35.

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

Welles, Orson

36.

To see things in the seed is genius.

Lao-Tzu

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

40.

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

41.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

42.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

43.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

44.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

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

Ray, Man

46.

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

Oscar Levant

47.

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

48.

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

Lowell, James Russell

49.

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

50.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.