Motivational Quotes

Genius

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.

Best Quotes about Genius

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

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

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

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

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

Stael, Germaine De

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

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

Heine, Heinrich

10.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Edison, Thomas A.

14.

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

Ray, Man

15.

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

16.

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

William Hazlitt

17.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

18.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

19.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Koestler, Arthur

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

25.

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

Pound, Ezra

26.

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

Hume, David

27.

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

Aristotle

28.

The divine egoism hat is genius.

Webb, Mary

29.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Nabokov, Vladimir

30.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

Welles, Orson

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.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

34.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

Genius is of no country.

Charles Churchill

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.

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

Lowell, James Russell

41.

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

42.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

43.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

45.

Accept your genius and say what you think.