Brilliance Quotes

It's family, and it's faith, and it's friends, and it's not the glamour of the Presidency, or the wonder of going to receive the Nobel Prize. All those are important, of course. But maybe it's just that I'm 71 years old now. It's family, and it's faith, and it's friends. I would tell them that. Don't forget that. In your brilliance, don't turn your back on your friends. Don't think you're entitled to something, you're smarter than the next guy. ~ George H. W. Bush

A person is not the product of her experiences, but of her choices. That's what affects the brilliance of a soul. ~ Christina Daley

Part of the brilliance of Stieg Larsson's books is that they are so complex, so many different facets coming together. ~ David Lagercrantz

We had stayed up all night my friends and I beneath mosque lamps hanging from the ceiling. Their brass domes were filigreed, starred like our souls; just as, again like our souls, they were illuminated by the imprisoned brilliance of an electric heart. On the opulent oriental rugs, we had crushed our ancestral lethargy, arguing all the way to the final frontiers of logic and blackening reams of paper with delirious writings. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

You win minds through your brilliance. You win hearts through your tenderness. You win souls through your benevolence. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

There had been a frozen mist here, and the trees were spun into feathers. Their fragile brilliance made me wonder why, into the spotlessness of Creation, God had seen fit to introduce soiling, twisting, rampaging, Man. ~ Maria McCann

I know of no other place that is so fascinating yet so frustrating, so aware of the world and its own place within it but at the same time utterly insular. A country touched by nostalgia, with a past so great - so marked by brilliance and achievement - that French people today seem both enriched and burdened by it. France is like a maddening, moody lover who inspires emotional highs and lows. One minute it fills you with a rush of passion, the next you're full of fury, itching to smack the mouth of some sneering shopkeeper or smug civil servant. Yes, it's a love-hate relationship. ~ Sarah Turnbull

It's like watching some rare exotic butterfly. Pleasant to watch, but you can't touch it, for as soon as you do, it dies, it's brilliance gone. ~ Haruki Murakami

Mephistopheles waved her off as she left. "One more woman running off with another man. I'm losing my touch."

"Have you considered you might be a Thorne in their sides?" Thomas asked. "You certainly can be a pric - "

"Thomas," I whispered harshly, pinching the inside of his elbow.

"How clever," Mephistopheles said blandly. "You've made my name into a pun. What other comedic brilliance will you think of next? I wish I could say I missed this" - he motioned between himself and Thomas - "but that sort of lying doesn't pay my bills."

"Nor do the gemstones on your suits," Thomas muttered.

"Are you still jealous about my jackets?" Mephistopheles grinned.

"For the love of the queen," I said, interrupting before they really got into it. ~ Kerri Maniscalco

Since I am a man, my heart is three or four times less sensitive, because I have three or four times as much power of reason and experience of the world
a thing which you women call hard-heartedness. As a man, I can take refuge in having mistresses. The more of them I have, and the greater the scandal, the more I acquire reputation and brilliance in society. ~ Bill Vaughan

You could wonder for hours what flowers mean, but for me, they're life itself, in all its happy brilliance. We couldn't do with out flowers. Flowers help you forget life's tragedies. ~ Marc Chagall

I never saw a sky like the sky over Dorrego - so vast, so black, with stars in an infinite array of size and brilliance. Maybe it seemed vast because the Earth didn't get in the way: the countryside around Dorrego is flat, there are no big cities to blot out the stars with their own clouds of gas, their artificial starlight. (Cities have a terrible tendency to try and imitate starlight, you only have to see them from a plane.) …
Before Dorrego, I had always thought of the sky as a black screen on which a handful of scattered stars twinkled vaguely, but were no more enthralling than the ceiling of the Cine Opera. Dorrego revealed the other sky, the boundless dome that sends you rushing to a dictionary for synonyms for 'infinite'; stars that clustered, not into constellations, but into galaxies; stars like swarms of bees which suggested not stillness or permanence but movement, the trail of something, of someone that passed just now, a moment ago, when you weren't looking. A sky that seemed to suddenly reveal the meaning of all things: Man's need to create language to describe it, geography to explain his place within it, biology to remind him that he is a newcomer in this universe, and history, because everything is written in the sky above Dorrego. ~ Marcelo Figueras

A step towards complacency is a step towards mediocrity;
a step towards diligence is a step towards brilliance. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

The brilliance of Adam Scott is that he is so damn funny in a straight man role. ~ Rob Thomas

If a huge genetic gap separated us from our closest relative in the animal kingdom, we could justifiably celebrate our brilliance. We might be entitled to walk around thinking we're distant and distinct from our fellow creatures. But no such gap exists. Instead, we are one with the rest of nature, fitting neither above nor below, but within. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Chaos leads to brilliance. ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Some men act upon women like champagne; when they appear the women are sparkling and full of brilliance; when they leave the fair ones grow flat, stale, and most unprofitable companions. ~ Minna Antrim

One advantage to being a despised species is that you have freedom, freedom to be any crazy thing you want. If you listen to a group of housewives talk, you'll hear a lot of nonsense, some of it really crazy. This comes, I think, from being alone so much, and pursuing your own odd train of thought without impediment, which some call discipline. The result is craziness, but also brilliance. Ordinary women come out with the damnedest truth. You ignore them at your own risk. And they are permitted to go on making wild statements without being put in one kind of jail or another (some of them, anyway) because everyone knows they're crazy and powerless too. If a woman is religious or earthy, passive or wildly assertive, loving or hating, she doesn't get much more flak than if she isn't: her choices lie between being castigated as a ball and chain or as a whore. ~ Marilyn French

TEKELI-LI. Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li. I got that from Pym. I got that from Poe. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe, specifically. Pym that is maddening, Pym that is brilliance, Pym whose failures entice instead of repel. Pym that flows and ignites and Pym that becomes so entrenched it stagnates for hundreds of words at a time. A book that at points makes no sense, gets wrong both history and science, and yet stumbles into an emotional truth greater than both. ~ Mat Johnson

There were many ways in which I disliked my sister. A few years ago I could have shown you whole scribbled lists I had written on that very topic. I hated her for the fact that she's got thick, straight hair, while mine breaks off if it grows beyond my shoulders. I hated her for the fact that you can never tell her anything that she doesn't already know. I hated her for the fact that for my whole school career teachers insisted on telling me in hushed tones how bright she was, as if her brilliance wouldn't mean that by default I lived in a permanent shadow. I hated her for the fact that at the age of twenty-six I lived in a box room in a semidetached house just so she could have her illegitimate son in with her in the bigger bedroom. ~ Jojo Moyes

In PLATO AT THE GOOGLEPLEX, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein set out to showcase, in sometimes startling ways, the continuing relevance of a classic philosopher. But what's remarkable is that she actually brings off this tour de force with both madcap brilliance and commanding authority. ~ Michael Dirda

I've realized I don't need to keep looking for my path. I'm already on it. I just need to trust where it leads. ~ Teresa R. Funke, Bursts Of Brilliance For A Creative Life Blog

Had there not been a Mary Todd, there would not have been an Abraham Lincoln. She found him when he was a young lawyer and really a bumpkin. No one knew of him, but she recognized his brilliance. ~ Sally Field

God is discovered entirely through creation - the brilliance of a sunset, the powerful roar of a waterfall, the symphony of sounds you hear in the heart of the forest, or the vastness of space and its countless stars. God is the mastermind behind all matter - every earth shattering scientific discovery and mystery that is yet to be unraveled was dreamed and enacted by God. ~ Benjamin F Sullivan

If you believe in learning, you believe in inquiry.
If you believe in education, you believe in literacy.
If you believe in knowledge, you believe in curiosity.
If you believe in understanding, you believe in practicality.
If you believe in reason, you believe in sanity.
If you believe in wisdom, you believe in sagacity.
If you believe in dreams, you believe in fantasy.
If you believe in diligence, you believe in prosperity.
If you believe in exellence, you believe in mastery.
If you believe in brilliance, you believe in longevity.
If you believe in wealth, you believe in luxury.
If you believe in justice, you believe in liberty.
If you believe in tolerance, you believe in equality.
If you believe in respect, you believe in courtesy.
If you believe in manners, you believe in civility.
If you believe in honor, you believe in decency.
If you believe in culture, you believe in history.
If you believe in tradition, you believe in stability.
If you believe in order, you believe in harmony.
If you believe in time, you believe in eternity.
If you believe in fate, you believe in destiny.
If you believe in life, you believe in reality.
If you believe in permanance, you believe in infinity.
If you believe in virtue, you believe in morality.
If you believe in peace, you believe in humanity.
If you believe in love, you believe in divinity.
If you believe in Go ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Too much brilliance has its disadvantages, and misplaced wit may raise a laugh, but often beheads a topic of profound interest. ~ Margot Asquith

THE NEW

All that appeared true seems to be coming unglued;
All that was established is being questioned anew;
All that was in place is being quickly erased;

We are coming to a crossroad on a collision course and the train is rapidly accelerating;
The winds of the New are howling and anxious to be embraced;
The usual is blinding and needs to be replaced;

So turn it around and rethink your thoughts;
The old ways are going and the cracks are showing;
Reshape the unchangeable and shake the unshakable;
Then face the new light with its brilliance absorbing you;

Now you've left behind what shouldn't have been and attained a new plateau to view the past;
When you arise the old will be left in the wake;
And you will go forward to a better place.

The Complaint, page 34. ~ Tom Breen

I'd rather wear jewels in my hair than anywhere else. The face should have the advantage of this brilliance. ~ Hedy Lamarr

Simplicity is the key to brilliance. ~ Bruce Lee

Jesmyn Ward is an alchemist. She transmutes pain and loss into gold. Men We Reaped illustrates hardships but thankfully, vitally, it's just as clear about the humor, the intelligence, the tenderness, the brilliance of the folks in DeLisle, Mississippi. A community that's usually wiped off the literary map can't be erased when it's in a book this good. ~ Victor LaValle

Knowledge is merely brilliance in organization of ideas and not wisdom. The truly wise person goes beyond knowledge. ~ Confucius

The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. ~ Peter Pomerantsev

Go now, and live.
Experience. Dream. Risk. Close your eyes and jump. Enjoy the freefall. Choose exhilaration over comfort. Choose magic over predictability. Choose potential over safety. Wake up to the magic of everyday life. Make friends with your intuition. Trust your gut. Discover the beauty of uncertainty. Know yourself fully before you make promises to another. Make millions of mistakes so that you will know how to choose what you really need. Know when to hold on and when to let go. Love hard and often and without reservation. Seek knowledge. Open yourself to possibility. Keep your heart open, your head high and your spirit free. Embrace your darkness along with your light. Be wrong everyday once in a while, and don't be afraid to admit it. Awaken to the brilliance in ordinary moments. Tell the truth about yourself no matter what the cost. Own your reality without apology. See goodness in the world. Be Bold. Be Fierce. Be Grateful. Be Wild, Crazy and Gloriously Free. Be You.
Go now, and live. ~ Jeanette LeBlanc

Your mind has great power;
tap into its brilliance.
Your heart has marvellous power;
tap into its excellence.
Your soul has divine power;
tap into its transcendence. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

In the old days, it had been talent and style and brilliance and now it was more and more productivity. ~ David Halberstam

Just as legendary rivers were used to represent the flow of life, so Mount Athos is a handy image to show human vulnerability. Its minerals themselves reminding us that ours is a planet constituted around Nature's awesome violence! Struggling to survive then, is integral to our existence. Literature on these issues, transforming rock and boulder into a subjective mountain, where fleshly mountaineers set forth, in the blinding brilliance of an alpine dawn, to ascend their own transgressions, remains telling. Breathing in, when nearing the top, to smell the pure air of spiritual comprehension: of heady intrinsic freedom, only to descend, once more, into the obscure and the pedestrian; albeit existentially transformed! In this way, indeed, Mount Athos transfigures many a man. ~ David William Parry

Listening to my regular favourites - Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and so on - I always feel, quite misguidedly, that nothing can be too bad if such beauty and brilliance exists in the world. ~ Jane Asher

Every magician knows there is no such thing as magic. They are masters of making things possible out of a situation that seems impossible. The key to getting what you want in life is to know that the only reason why something is, is because it was made possible. It can only be if it is possible for it to be. Make it possible and let it be. ~ Timothy Simpson

The bright light of brilliance keeps the darkness away, but it can be so very exhausting. ~ Fennel Hudson

As artists, it is our job to question the rules and ask if they are relevant or outdated, necessary or arbitrary, helpful or oppressive. ~ Teresa R. Funke, Bursts Of Brilliance For A Creative Life Blog

The more south we were, the more deep a sky it seemed, till, in the Valley of Mexico, I thought it held back an element too strong for life, and that the flamy brilliance of blue stood off this menace and sometimes, like a sheath or silk membrane, shoed the weight it held in sags. So when later he would fly high over the old craters on the plain, coaly bubbles of the underworld, dangerous red everywhere from the sun, and then coats of snow on the peak of the cones - gliding like a Satan - well, it was here the old priests, before the Spaniards, waited for Aldebaran to come into the middle of heaven to tell them whether or not life would go on for another cycle, and when they received their astronomical sign built their new fire inside the split and emptied chest of a human sacrifice. And also, hereabouts, worshipers disguised as gods and as gods in the disguise of birds, jumped from platforms fixed on long poles, and glided as they spun by the ropes - feathered serpents, and eagles too, the voladores, or fliers. There still are such plummeters, in market places, as there seem to be remnants or conversions or equivalents of all the old things. Instead of racks or pyramids of skulls still in their hair and raining down scraps of flesh there are corpses of dogs, rats, horses, asses, by the roads; the bones dug out of the rented graves are thrown on a pile when the lease is up; and there are the coffins looking like such a rough joke on the female form, sold in the open shops, bl ~ Saul Bellow

The harvest moon has no innocence, like the slim quarter moon of a spring twilight, nor has it the silver penny brilliance of the moon that looks down upon the resorts of summer time. Wise, ripe, and portly, like an old Bacchus, it waxes night after night. ~ Donald C. Peattie

It is not brilliance or facility that is necessary, but the determination to bear and even enjoy the dull process of wading into one's own bad prose again, and one more time, and then once again, with the utmost concentration and taste, looking for opportunities to mine deeper. ~ Stewart O'Nan

You now get to decide for yourself just what the scope and clarity of your brilliance can be….This is the writer's life. And for this there is no teacher left. So go for it. Wow yourself. ~ Scott Herndon

You know, life is not so original after all. It has uncanny ways of reminding us that, even without a god, there is a flash of retrospective brilliance in the way fate plays its cards. It doesn't deal us fifty-two cards; it deals, say, four or five, and they happen to be the same ones our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents played. The cards look pretty frayed and bent. The choice of sequences is limited: at some point the cards will repeat themselves, seldom in the same order, but always in a pattern that seems uncannily familiar. Sometimes the last card is not even played by the one whose life ended. Fate doesn't always respect what we believe is the end of life. It will deal your last card to those who come after. Which is why I think all lives are condemned to remain unfinished. ~ Andre Aciman

He had his one life. In June 1942 he went to Lazarevo holding it in his hands. By the shores of the Kama, he found her gorgeous and restored, and not just restored to her original shining brilliance but enlarged and clarified. Light reflected off her, no matter which way she turned. They ran down to the almighty river. She never even looked back. She would never know what it meant to him, an unremitting sinner, after all the unsacred things he had seen and done, to have her innocence. He held her to him. He had dreamed of it too long, touching her. Dreamed of seeing her naked too long, beautiful, bare, ready for him. He was afraid to hurt her. He had never been with an untouched girl before; he wasn't sure if he was supposed to do something first. In the end, he did nothing first, but she baptized him with her body. There was no Alexander anymore; the man he knew had died and was reborn inside a perfect heart, given to him straight from God, to him and for him. ~ Paullina Simons

But tell me: how did gold get to be the highest value? Because it is uncommon and useless and gleaming and gentle in its brilliance; it always gives itself. Only as an image of the highest virtue did gold get to be the highest value. The giver's glance gleams like gold. A golden brilliance concludes peace between the moon and the sun. Uncommon is the highest virtue and useless, it is gleaming and gentle in its brilliance: a gift-giving virtue is the highest virtue. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring - but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. See how, in the arts, Kabuki wanes and withers while popular novels of violence and mindless action swamp the mind of the mass reader. And even in that timid genre, no author dares to produce a genuinely superior man as his hero, for in his rage of shame the mass man will send his yojimbo, the critic, to defend him. The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down. ~ Trevanian

A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a brilliance that isn't there ~ Stephen Fry

Brilliance is one part talent, two parts wisdom and three parts passion. ~ Margaret Mitchell

Talent helps mankind leap years.
Brilliance helps mankind leap decades.
Genius helps mankind leap centuries. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

There is tremendous stress these days on liking people, helping people, getting along with people, as qualifications for a manager. These alone are never enough. In every successful organization there is one boss who does not like people, who does not help them, and who does not get along with them. Cold, unpleasant, demanding, he often teaches and develops more men than anyone else. He commands more respect than the most likable man ever could. He demands exacting workmanship of himself as well as of his men. He sets high standards and expects that they will be lived up to. He considers only what is right and never who is right. And though often himself a man of brilliance, he never rates intellectual brilliance above integrity in others. The manager who lacks these qualities of character - no matter how likable, helpful, or amiable, no matter even how competent or brilliant - is a menace and should be adjudged "unfit to be a manager and a gentleman. ~ Peter F. Drucker

~ Today fill your heart with knowing of your brilliance ~ ~ Tracy R.L. O'Flaherty

The curve of imagination, the curve of brilliance and the curve of sanity are identical curves or at least similar curves ... The more imagination a person has, why, the more intelligence, the more knowingness he has and the saner he's going to be. ~ L. Ron Hubbard

My mum is in a mental hospital. There's a fine line between genius and insanity. Winston Churchill, Mozart, John Lennon. These people all had a touch of crazy that fuelled their brilliance. They were not locked up for it like my mum. Pft. Then again, Winston Churchill never tried to kill my dad. ~ Christopher Titus

External beauty is certainly cool to admire, but when worshipped - it eclipses internal shine. ~ T.F. Hodge

My family made it through Hurricane Sandy. We have water, power, and a roof, but the survivor's guilt makes me want to hide. Sneak away from the brilliance of life. It shouts at me: 'Don't enjoy anything too much; people are suffering.' I feel childlike somehow. ~ Alysia Reiner

The dark breaks wide in fragile rays. Dawn on Ithiss-Tor is more subtle than other sunrises. I have lost count of the worlds where I have stood and watched the light rise, peeling away the sky, sometimes in quiet colors, and sometimes in raw, violent slashes, as if the goddess I don't believe in has cut her veins. And sometimes, as on Gehenna, the sky changes not at all, just endless night, or endless brilliance
and after a time, the constant uniformity makes you feel as if you are the thing that must give way. ~ Ann Aguirre

Some people's brilliance is in their head. A surgeon's brilliance is in her hands. But there are people who have brilliant hearts. They shine right through them. ~ Gennifer Choldenko

A public official must understand from his first day in office that any show of initiative will signal the end of his career because he isn't there to be meritorious but to reach his level of incompetence with dignity. ~ Isabelle Allende

Capablanca was among the greatest of chess players, but not because of his endgame. His trick was to keep his openings simple, and then play with such brilliance in the middlegame that the game was decided - even though his ooponent didn't always know it - before they arrived at the ending. ~ Bobby Fischer

One arranges flowers as the spirit moves you; to obey some inner prompting to put this colour with that, to have brilliance here, line there, a sense of opulence in this place or sparseness in that; to suit your surroundings, your mood, the weather, the occasion. In a word, to do as you please, just as, if you could, you might paint a picture. ~ Constance Spry

I would later discover it was a bad idea to gather more than two of these people in an enclosed area for any length of time. The stage was not only a physical place but also a state of mind, and the word audience was defined as anyone forced to suffer your company. We young actors were a string of lightbulbs left burning 24 hours a day, exhausting ourselves and others with our self-proclaimed brilliance. ~ David Sedaris

It extols death with the luminescent brilliance of a dying star. It is Genghis Khan bathed in sherbet ice cream. The mantis shrimp is the harbinger of blood-soaked rainbows. ~ The Oatmeal

...though the conversation always touched an exceptionally high level of brilliance, there was apt to be a good deal of sugar thrown about. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Show me your talents and I'll show you your net worth. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

In periods when shallow speculation is rife, one might think that metaphysics would shine forth, at least, by the brilliance of its modest reserve. But the very age that is unaware of the majesty of metaphysics, likewise overlooks its poverty. Its majesty? It is wisdom. Its poverty? It is human science. ~ Jacques Maritain

God's goal isn't simply to fill the world with people who believe the right things. It is to fill the world with people who shine with the brilliance of Christ. ~ Ann Spangler

Your strength is your ticket to persistence.
Your mind is your ticket to brilliance.
Your heart is your ticket to excellence.
Your soul is your ticket to transcendence. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

As you grow older, don't let the changing colour of your clothes compensate for the brilliance of your character. ~ Myself

ROSES UNDERFOOT

The sound of salaams rising as
waves diminish down in prayer,

hoping for some trace of the one
whose trace does not appear. If

anyone asks you to say who you
are, say without hesitation,

soul withing soul within soul.
There's a pearl diver who does

not know how to swim! No matter.
Pearls are handed him on the

beach. We lovers laugh to hear,
"This should be more that and

that more this,"coming from
people sitting in a wagon tilted

in a ditch. Going in search of
the heart, I found a huge rose

under my feet, and roses under
all our feet! How to say this

to someone who denies it? The
robe we wear is the sky's cloth.

Everything is soul and flowering.

---------------------------------

I open and fill with love and
other objects evaporate. All

the learning in books stays put
on the shelf. Poetry, the dear

words and images of song, comes
down over me like mountain water.


----------------------------------

Any cup I hold fills with wine
that lovers drink. Every word

I say opens into mystery. Any way I turn I see brilliance. ~ Rumi

I would dazzle you with brilliance, if I only had the knack. Cause I like you just the way you are. ~ Danny Elfman

The boy knelt, shoulders bowed, on the sand in the grey of morning, moaning softly, fearfully. Glowing tendrils of energy streamed across the agitated sky, converging high above him in a vortex of brightness. He flung his hands heavenward and a sheet of blinding brilliance descended from the vortex. It enveloped him and from its core a pulsing sphere of light fell, entering his body and almost tearing him apart. He went rigid, screaming to shatter the heavens, his dark eyes bulging from their sockets, his mouth wide in a rictus of agony. Sirius exploded in a burst of silver-blue radiance, as his howl rose to a shriek beyond hearing and endurance. Out of the light and the sound and the anguish, two names imprinted themselves on his mind. One of them, he knew, was his own.
The other floated for an instant above his consciousness like a fugitive white dove in the morning. ~ J. Valor

Poverty is the origin of invention ~ Sunday Adelaja

MR. ICKY: Is your mind in good shape? DIVINE: (Gloomily) Fair. After all what is brilliance? Merely the tact to sow when no one is looking and reap when every one is. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Let your work speak for itself:
If poor, it will remain silent.
If average, it will whisper.
If good, it will talk.
If great, it will shout.
If genius, it will sing. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

A volunteer, you assign yourself specific roles and risks according to your judgement of their brilliance and importance, and you see when life itself may be justifiably devoted to them. ~ Michel De Montaigne

The miracle is that the brilliance of the miraculous can live in the blandness of the mundane. The greater miracle is that we have enough brilliance in our own blandness to see it. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

This year, of course, being 1936, there would be no figs. ~ Alan Furst

The world is changing. No matter what any of us is shopping for, we can find good products, good services, good solutions. We want to enjoy the experience of using those products, those services. This firm doesn't have a lock on brilliance. Your prospective clients can find that elsewhere. They want to enjoy the experience of implementing a brilliant solution in collegial and congenial partnership with teh people who brought it to them. ~ Susan Scott

They inched through dense, heart-stopping darkness. In the distance was what looked like a bright white door cut out of a black wall. Sunni tiptoed towards it, puzzled by its brilliance. ~ Teresa Flavin

17th century philosophers were not in a position to understand the mind as well as we can today, since the advent of experimental methods in psychology. It shows no disrespect for the brilliance of Descartes or Kant to acknowledge that the psychology which they worked with was primitive by comparison with what is available today in the cognitive sciences, any more than it shows disrespect for the brilliance of Aristotle to acknowledge that the physics he worked with does not compare with that of Newton or Einstein. ~ Hilary Kornblith

The good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail, and volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men, reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the land. ~ Virginia Woolf

But what I remember is the countryside then, the brilliance of outdoors and outwindows, and the sunlight streaming through the lozenge shapes of the glass, and we were locked away from it, locked inside to worship. And there was the sun out there for everyone else to see. Good God, tell me Clovis wasn't lonely at dawn. Tell me he wasn't sick at the sunset. ~ William Gaddis

They gathered after mass, sang hymns and read. Everyone had grown even more serene; beneath the sisters' kerchiefs it was as if there were no faces. When they met Daryushka - it was as if they bowed down lower. She was walking in the Spirit.

Daryushka was entirely serene. She was thinking of nothing, had turned within herself, peering inside; and inside her all was smiling ever so gently.

After the storm clear days came, frosty, crackling, clear days. Snow and sky, snow and sky, and the sky was even brighter, whiter, from the snow - and the snow sparkled with blue fires from the sky.

Daryushka went down to the river with buckets, to the ice-hole. She went down to the landing alone... Snow, and sky, and brilliance...

("He Has Descended") ~ Zinaida Gippius

Jimmy Fallon and I play regularly at the Bayonne Golf Club in Jersey. He's eighteen holes of fun. Any time we play he has moments of brilliance, but also moments of utter catastrophe. ~ Mario Batali

We want so much from those who love us: friendship, understanding, conversation, and kindness - and companionship, and sex, and children, and even money or someone to cook dinner or mow the grass. Sometimes, at the bottom of things, when we are most in love, we want our partners to be for us the same as God.
But only in our deepest part are we divine, and most of us live within our smaller selves most of the time. And so who can be the all and everything for another? Who can be the sun that lights up the soul and drives away despair, depression, and fear, not just for a night of love or a season of romance, but for a whole long lifetime until death do part?
I have often wondered at the relationship between splendor and love. It seems to me that love is the very heart of splendor, its deepest purpose, while splendor gives fire and brilliance to love. I know that just as we can place too great a demand on love and the one we fall in love with, so we can want too much of splendor. In this, I think, we make a great mistake. We should want to shine as an expression of our true nature, not because splendor itself will save us from our darker side. ~ David Zindell

Light flooded their senses; for a split second Olivia, blinking in its brilliance, thought the light was actually yellow. Then she blinked again, and the room itself was yellow: yellow roses climbing the walls, a white and yellow canopy- of course, a canopy- matching the wadded silk bedspread, braided yellow rugs strewn across the bare wooden floorboards. Abby gave a little cry and ran to the curved windows opposite, where a riot of yellow and pink throw pillows lined the window seat. ~ Susan Gilbert-Collins

Oh,' said a very white body as it threw a wrist watch to the ground which broke without attracting anyone's attention, 'Oh, how can anyone not love poetry, natural machines, large white houses, the brilliance of steel, crimes and wild passions? ~ Robert Desnos

Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back. It's time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must. ~ Seth Godin

The technical brilliance of Lang Lang and the musical genius to create a masterpiece on the spot. ~ Ian Brown

Dick tried to rest - the struggle would come presently at home and he might have to sit a long time, restating the universe for her. A "schizophrêne" is well named as a split personality - Nicole was alternately a person to whom nothing need be explained and one to whom nothing could be explained. It was necessary to treat her with active and affirmative insistence, keeping the road to reality always open, making the road to escape harder going. But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Brilliance in a scientist does not consist in being right more often but in being wrong about more interesting topics. ~ Kent Beck

Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Country gentlemen who read in their newspapers the speeches of this or that Minister would mutter to themselves that he was certainly a clever fellow. But the country gentlemen were not made comfortable by this thought. The country gentlemen had a strong suspicion that cleverness was somehow unBritish. That sort of restless, unpredictable brilliance belonged most of all to Britain's arch-enemy, the Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte; the country gentlemen could not approve it. ~ Susanna Clarke

Raw and delicate, poignant and poetic, Shelby Smoak's Bleeder exposes the sorrow and sometimes sweetness of coming to age with HIV. In a world of misunderstanding and stigmas, the young Smoak searches for love and acceptance, and his readers can't help but find themselves becoming emotionally attached to him. His is an observant and encompassing story, noticing the brilliance of existence that others might take for granted. The sunsets written here are more lovely than in life. ~ Jenny Boully

We are all wounded. But wounds are necessary for his healing light to enter into our beings. Without wounds and failure and frustrations and defeats, there will be no opening for his brilliance to tickle in and invade our lives. Failures in life are courses with very high tuition fees, so I don't cut classes and miss my lessons: on humility, on patience, on hope, on asking others for help, on listening to God, on trying again and again and again. ~ Bo Sanchez

I'm saddened by the loss of Black Diamonds that we bury by the thousands every year never knowing the brilliance they possess. I call you my brother
and we embrace with such sincerity while our mother's tears saturate the grounds where our diamonds lay at rest. My question to you, is this innate or hate? We are greater than the current narrative. We must allow the diamonds to shine. May they shine from above. ~ Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

There is nothing that exasperates people more than a display of superior ability or brilliance in conversation. They seem pleased at the time, but their envy makes them curse the conversationalist in their heart. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

the irrepressible, quivering brilliance of her eyes and her smile set him on fire ~ Leo Tolstoy