Motivational Quotes

Genius

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

- Oscar Wilde

Best Quotes about Genius

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

William Hazlitt

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

Penney, J. C. (James Cash)

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Huxley, Aldous

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

Oscar Levant

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc

10.

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

11.

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

Hume, David

12.

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

Welles, Orson

13.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

14.

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

15.

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

Aragon, Louis

16.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

17.

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

18.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

Wilde, Oscar

19.

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

20.

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

Dahlberg, Edward

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Child, Lydia M.

25.

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

26.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

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

28.

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

Weil, Simone

29.

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

Oscar Wilde

30.

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

Churchill, Winston

31.

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.

32.

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Lund, Robert S.

33.

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

Da Vinci, Leonardo

34.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

35.

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.

37.

Genius is independent of situation.

Churchill, Charles

38.

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

Picasso, Pablo

39.

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

Stael, Germaine De

40.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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

42.

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

Stein, Gertrude

43.

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

Koestler, Arthur

44.

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

45.

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Hugo, Victor

46.

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

Ray, Man

47.

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

James, William

48.

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