Inspiration and Genius – One and the Same

This was a quote from Victor Hugo. Another person that I think was incredible was Albert Einstein – a passionate genius who was both left and right brained – but that’s another story. Since I have a fascination with Genius I thought it prudent to find some more famous “Genius” type quotes – and here they are!

“Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.”
Edison

“Genius is nothing but a greater aptitude for patience.”
Benjamin Franklin

“Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.”
Joseph Joubert

“Genius is divine perseverance. Genius I cannot claim nor even extra brightness but perseverance all can have.”
Woodrow Wilson

“Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can.”
Bulwer-Lytton

“Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.”
Benjamin Disraeli

“Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you.”
Malcolm Cowley

“One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire.”
John W. Foster

“Genius is only great patience.”
Buffon

“Doing easily what others find is difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.”
Henri Frederic Amiel

“Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.”
Arthur Conan Doyle

“If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.”
Joseph Addison

“Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
Albert Einstein

“Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.”
Albert Einstein

“Highly developed spirits often encounter resistance from mediocre minds.”
Albert Einstein

“Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.”
Alexander Hamilton

“The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement in a manner that would be amusingly absurd were it not so monstrously unjust and socially harmful.”
Anna Garlin Spencer

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.”
Arthur Conan Doyle, Sr

“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.”
Bruce Feirstein

“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

“The kind of intelligence a genius has is a different sort of intelligence. The thinking of a genius does not proceed logically. It leaps with great ellipses. It pulls knowledge from God knows where.”
Dorothy Thompson

“Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.”
Elbert Hubbard

“Since when was genius found respectable?”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.”
Fulton J. Sheen

“Everyone is a genius at least once a year. A real genius has his original ideas closer together.”
Georg C. Lichtenberg

“We are the leaves of one branch, the drops of one sea, the flowers of one garden.”
Jean Baptiste Henry Lacordaire

“The word “genius” isn’t applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.”
Joe Theisman

“Society develops wit, but its contemplation alone forms genius.”
Madame de Stael

“There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.”
Oscar Levant

“In the republic of mediocrity genius is dangerous.”
Robert G. Ingersoll

“There is no great genius without some touch of madness.”
Seneca

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
Thomas Alva Edison

“Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”
William James

“Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart