Quotes about genius

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

— Joey Lauren Adams

Genius is sorrow's child.

— John Adams

It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women.

— Louisa May Alcott

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

— Henri Frederic Amiel

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.

— Henri Frederic Amiel

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

— Louis Aragon

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.

— Aristotle

There are big men, men of intellect, intellectual men, men of talent and men of action; but the great man is difficult to find, and it needs --apart from discernment --a certain greatness to find him.

— Margot Asquith

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

— W. H. Auden

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

— Charles Baudelaire

Genius is childhood recaptured.

— Jean Baudrillard

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

— Simone De Beauvoir

Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.

— Henry Ward Beecher

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.

— Sir Max Beerbohm

Genius is the gold in the mine; talent is the miner who works and brings it out.

— Countess of Marguerite Gardiner Blessington

Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.

— Christian Nevell Bovee

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

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Since when was genius found respectable?

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.

— Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon

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

— Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.

— Samuel Butler

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.

— Lord Byron

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

— Italo Calvino

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

— Thomas Carlyle

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

— C. W. Ceran

Passion holds up the bottom of the universe and genius paints up its roof.

— Chao Chang

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

— Lydia M. Child

Genius is independent of situation.

— Charles Churchill

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

— Winston Churchill

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.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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.

— Charles Caleb Colton

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.

— William Crashaw

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

— Leonardo Da Vinci

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

— Edward Dahlberg

Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.

— Robertson Davies

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.

— Eugene Delacroix

Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.

— Denis Diderot

Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Genius, when young, is divine.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius.

— Isaac Disraeli

Genius must be born, and never can be taught.

— John Dryden

Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.

— John Dryden

Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought, but genius must be born; and never can be taught.

— John Dryden

His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.

— Thomas A. Edison

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

— Thomas A. Edison

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest genius is the most indebted person.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men -- that is genius.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Accept your genius and say what you think.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Desiderius Erasmus

Genius is entitled to respect only when it promotes the peace and improves the happiness of mankind.

— Lord Essex

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

— Benjamin Franklin

Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What's a sundial in the shade.

— Benjamin Franklin

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

— Buckminster Fuller

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.

— Margaret Fuller

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.

— Jose Ortega Y Gasset

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

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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.

— Alexander Hamilton

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.

— B. R. Hayden

The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously; and those who have produced immortal works, have done so without knowing how or why. The greatest power operates unseen.

— William Hazlitt

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

— Francis Herbert Hedge

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

— Heinrich Heine

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

— Josiah Gilbert Holland

The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Elbert Hubbard

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

— Victor Hugo

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

— David Hume

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

— Aldous Huxley

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.

— Washington Irving

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

— William James

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.

— James Joyce

Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.

— Carl Jung

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.)

— Paul Klee

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.

— Peter Kline

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

— Arthur Koestler

To see things in the seed is genius.

— Lao-Tzu

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.

— Johann Kaspar Lavater

Genius always gives its best at first; prudence, at last.

— Johann Kaspar Lavater

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

— George Henry Lewes

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Towering genius disdains a beaten path.

— Abraham Lincoln

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.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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

— James Russell Lowell

Every person of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

— Robert S. Lund

Genius is eternal patience.

— Michelangelo

There is no genius in life like the genius of energy and industry.

— Don G. Mitchell

Genius without religion is only a lamp on the outer gate of a palace; it may serve to cast a gleam of light on those that are without, while the inhabitant sits in darkness.

— Hannah More

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

— Vladimir Nabokov

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

— J. C. (James Cash) Penney

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Ezra Pound