Motivational Quotes

Genius

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

- Seneca

Best Quotes about 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

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

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

Oscar Levant

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Edgard Varese

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

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

Lewes, George Henry

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.

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

11.

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

Beauvoir, Simone De

12.

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

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

13.

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

Stael, Germaine De

14.

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

15.

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

Koestler, Arthur

16.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

17.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

18.

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

Ray, Man

19.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

20.

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

21.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

22.

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

23.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

24.

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

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

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

Thomajan, Puzant Kevork

28.

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

Pound, Ezra

29.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

31.

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

William Hazlitt

32.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

33.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

34.

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

35.

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

Auden, W. H.

36.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Picasso, Pablo

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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.

41.

Every man is a potential genius until he does something.

Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm

42.

The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.

Child, Lydia M.

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

Samuel Butler

47.

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

Weil, Simone

48.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

49.

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

50.

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

Picasso, Pablo