Best quotes on genius and talent, a selection of great aphorisms about the mysterious nature of human creativity in the the world of art, literature and science.
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
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
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
Ordinary people think that talent must be always on its own level and that it arises every morning like the sun, rested and refreshed, ready to draw from the same storehouse – always open, always full, always abundant – new treasures that it will heap up on those of the day before; such people are unaware that, as in the case of all mortal things, talent has its increase and decrease, and that independently of the career it takes, like everything that breathes… it undergoes all the accidents of health, of sickness, and of the dispositions of the soul – its gaiety or its sadness. As with our perishable flesh talent is obliged constantly to keep guard over itself, to combat, and to keep perpetually on the alert amid the obstacles that witness the exercise of its singular power.
Eugene Delacroix
A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It’s the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.
May Sarton
Talent isn’t genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing. I won’t be a commonplace dauber, so I don’t intend to try any more.
Louisa May Alcott
Even if a genius is in heaven, he still has hell within him.
Carl William Brown
The worst that can happen to a genius is to be understood.
Ennio Flaiano
Memory, speed of calculation and precision, all things that cannot compete with the creativity of genius.
Carl William Brown
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
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
Aldous Huxley
Men of genius seem to me more suited to overthrowing or founding states than to maintaining them.
Denis Diderot
Genius is often neglected, rejected, ignored, and despised; ultimately, its existence is spent amidst worry, anger, bitterness, and melancholy.
Carl William Brown Via E. Kretschmer
Passion is the genesis of genius.
Galileo Galilei
A genius is one who can do anything except make a living.
Joey Lauren Adams
Genius is sorrow’s child.
John Adams
The more distinctly a man knows, the more intelligent he is, the more pain he has; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.
Albert Einstein
I consider the genius, in any form, as an effort of nature to produce, among great sacrifices, a better human prototype, more successful, more worthy of life than usual.
Hermann Hesse
God give them wisdom that have it, and those that are fools, let them use their talents.
William Shakespeare
The more distinctly a man knows, the more intelligent he is, the more pain he has; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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
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
The first great genius rebel in history is an angel, Satan, who wasn’t too keen on God’s overwhelming power; though defeated, he remains immortal, as do rebellion and evil.
Carl William Brown
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.
Max Beerbohm
Genius is the gold in the mine; talent is the miner who works and brings it out.
Marguerite Gardiner
Genius makes its observations in short-hand; talent writes them out at length.
John Christian Bovee
Since when was genius found respectable?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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
Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will go its whole life believing it to be stupid.
Albert Einstein
Fools are to genius enthusiasts what cute lab rats are to science researchers.
Carl William Brown
True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.
Winston Churchill
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
Sometimes it’s better to isolate yourself than to contaminate your genius with the pernicious arrogance of stupidity and foolish, cultured vanity.
Carl William Brown
Genius is independent of situation.
Charles Churchill
The first simple and concrete action to help spread genius is to help fight stupidity.
Carl William Brown
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
What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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
Genius, when young, is divine.
Benjamin Disraeli
Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.
Benjamin Disraeli
In this stupid and waste land it would certainly be better for all those hollow men to become a bit more humanly and geniously Fool!
Carl William Brown
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
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Thomas A. Edison
His genius he was quite content in one brief sentence to define; Of inspiration one percent, of perspiration, ninety nine.
Thomas A. Edison
Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.
George Eliot
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
Accept your genius and say what you think.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A genius must necessarily create, and if he cannot create, he must necessarily destroy. Ultimately, it’s always the same thing.
Carl William Brown
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
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
Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade.
Benjamin Franklin
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
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
Genius often also knows the works and psychology of idiots; unfortunately, stupidity is ignorant of the philosophy of genius.
Carl William Brown
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
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 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.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
Benjamin Franklin
Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering pot and pruning knife.
Margaret Witter 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 Witter Fuller
I’m not a genius. I’m just a tremendous bundle of experience.
R. Buckminster Fuller
My genius may be a tribute to repetition, but it’s certainly never a flattery of stupidity.
Carl William Brown
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
True genius walks along a line, and, perhaps, our greatest pleasure is in seeing it so often near falling, without being ever actually down.
Oliver Goldsmith
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
Brilliance is merely the reverse of stupidity, the face of universal nothingness.
Carl William Brown
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
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
Genius and madness created Hitler, but conformism and stupidity then caused Nazism and its consequences.
Carl William Brown
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
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
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
Genius always gives its best at first; prudence, at last.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
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
The real people of genius were resolute workers not idle dreamers.
George Henry Lewes
Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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
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.
Donald 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
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
Ezra Pound
Geniuses themselves don’t talk about the gift of genius, they just talk about hard work and long hours.
J. C. (James Cash) Penney
Genius is personality with a penny’s worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.
Pablo Picasso
The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
Pablo Picasso
Genius can be recognized by its childish simplicity.
Chinese Proverb
One of the satisfactions of a genius is his will-power and obstinacy.
Man Ray
The lamp of genius burns quicker than the lamp of life.
Johann Friedrich Von Schiller
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.
Friedrich Schlegel
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.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.
Anne Germain De Stael
It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Gertrude Stein
When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift
True genius sees with the eyes of a child and thinks with the brain of a genius.
Puzant Kevork Thomajan
Every man is a potential genius until he does something.
Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree
The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.
H. R. Trevor-Roper
Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered – either by themselves or by others.
Mark Twain
Genius is nothing more than inflamed enthusiasm.
Author Unknown
So few people think. When we find one who really does, we call him a genius
Author Unknown
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.
Author Unknown
I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
Oscar Wilde
The divine egoism hat is genius.
Mary Webb
Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.
Simone Weil
Everybody denies I am a genius – but nobody ever called me one!
Orson Welles
Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.
Oscar Wilde
I have nothing to declare except my genius.
Oscar Wilde
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Oscar Wilde
Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.
Bern Williams
Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
Virginia Woolf
Those who are blessed with the most talent don’t necessarily outperform everyone else. It’s the people with follow-through who excel.
Mary Kay Ash
I believe that every person is born with talent.
Maya Angelou
There is no such thing as can’t, only won’t. If you’re qualified, all it takes is a burning desire to accomplish, to make a change. Go forward, go backward. Whatever it takes! But you can’t blame other people or society in general. It all comes from your mind. When we do the impossible we realize we are special people.
Jan Ashford
It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.
W. H. Auden
There are two kinds of talent; man-made talent and God-given talent. With man-made talent, you have to work very hard. With God-given talent, you just touch it up once in a while.
Pearl Bailey
If true genius is unknown and fools are so popular, then the odds certainly need to be redressed a bit.
Carl William Brown
Talent is only the starting point.
Irving Berlin
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say, “I used everything you gave me.”.
Erma Bombeck
Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.
Gerald Brenan
Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.
Gerald Brenan
If I have any talent at all it’s from God, and my mom, who was on Capitol Records also.
Garth Brooks
Your talent is God’s gift to you; what you do with it is your gift to God.
Leo Buscaglia
God doesn’t give people talents that he doesn’t want people to use.
Iron Eagle
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly
A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius.
Charles Horton Cooley
Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.
Edward Degas
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.
Henry Van Dyke
Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is a happy talent to know how to play.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Concealed talent brings no reputation.
Desiderius Erasmus
No one respects a talent that is concealed.
Desiderius Erasmus
Talents go by nature not by birth.
(Frederick II) Frederick The Great
The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.
Andre Gide
A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting – intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one’s own experience and sensations, to make one’s self heard and seen.
Uta Hagen
Hard work without talent is a shame, but talent without hard work is a tragedy.
Robert Half
If you have this enormous talent, it’s got you by the balls, it’s a demon. You can’t be a family man and a husband and a caring person and be that animal. Dickens wasn’t that nice a guy.
Dustin Hoffman
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.
Aldous Huxley
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
Erica Jong
Most men, like plants, possess hidden qualities that chance discovers.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
Some bad qualities form great talents.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.
Owen Meredith
The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable.
Thomas B. Macaulay
The greatest thing a man can do in this world is to make the most possible out of the stuff that has been given him. This is success, and there is no other.
Orison Swett Marden
Use those talents you have. You will make it. You will give joy to the world. Take this tip from nature: the woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except those who sang best.
Bernard Meltzer
This is how I define talent; it is a gift that God has given us in secret, which we reveal without knowing it.
Charles De Montesquieu
Hidden talent counts for nothing.
Nero (37-68, Roman emperor)
He had a lot of talent, but didn’t have much dedication; wasn’t organized, didn’t know how to learn, didn’t know how to comprehend what he was doing, didn’t try to learn how to get better.
Jack Nicklaus
Premature development of the powers of both mind and body leads to an early grave.
John Quinton
The greatest talents often lie buried out of sight.
Titus Maccius Plautus
Everyone according to their talent and every talent according to its work.
French Proverb
Talent is a matter of quantity. Talent does not write one page, it writes three hundred.
Jules Renard
I don’t have a lot of respect for talent; talent is genetic. It’s what you do with it that counts.
Martin Ritt
I thought my talent would transcend my outspokenness. I was wrong.
Mickey Rourke
Talent is something, but tact is everything. It is the interpreter of all riddles, the surmounter of all difficulties, the remover of all obstacles.
W. P. Scargill
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Talent works, genius creates.
Robert Schumann
Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Talent is nothing but a prolonged period of attention and a shortened period of mental assimilation.
Konstantin Stanislavisky
Everyone has special talents, and it is our duty to find ours and use them well.
John Templeton
A man gift will make a way for him.
The Holy Bible
I’d rather have a lot of talent and a little experience than a lot of experience and a little talent.
John Wooden
