Brilliant Quotes

“Nothing is more creative... nor destructive... than a brilliant mind with a purpose.”
― Dan Brown, Inferno

“The heart is stubborn. It holds onto love despite what sense and emotion tells it. And it is often, in the battle of those three, the most brilliant of all.”
― Alessandra Torre

“Rollins held up his watch chain. A turnip was hanging from the fob where his diamond-studded time piece should have been. "That little bastard--" Then a thought came to him. He reached for his wallet. It was gone. So was his tie pin, the Kaelish coin pendant he wore for luck, and the gold buckles on his shoes. Rollins wondered if he should check the fillings in his teeth.
"He picked your pockets?" Doughty asked incredulously.
No one got one over on Pekka Rollins. No one dared. But Brekker had, and Rollins wondered if that was just the beginning.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“Love is friendship. Just with less clothes, which makes it far more brilliant.”
― Elizabeth Hunter, A Hidden Fire

“It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

“And so the merry party began. It was one of those jolly, happy, bread-crumbling parties where you cough twice before you speak, and then decide not to say it after all.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves

“Goodnight nobody. Goodnight mush.”
― Margaret Wise Brown

“Over recent years, [there's been] a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers so that [teachers] have to teach to tests and the test determines what happens to the child, and what happens to the teacher...that's guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process: it means the teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual students' needs, that a student can't pursue things [...] and the teacher's future depends on it as well as the students'...the people who are sitting in the offices, the bureaucrats designing this - they're not evil people, but they're working within a system of ideology and doctrines, which turns what they're doing into something extremely harmful [...] the assessment itself is completely artificial; it's not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children who reach their potential, explore their creative interests and so on [...] you're getting some kind of a 'rank,' but it's a 'rank' that's mostly meaningless, and the very ranking itself is harmful. It's turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank, not into doing things that are valuable and important.

It's highly destructive...in, say, elementary education, you're training kids this way [...] I can see it with my own children: when my own kids were in elementary school (at what's called a good school, a good-quality suburban school), by the time they were in third grade, they were dividing up their friends into 'dumb' and 'smart.' You had 'dumb' if you were lower-tracked, and 'smart' if you were upper-tracked [...] it's just extremely harmful and has nothing to do with education. Education is developing your own potential and creativity. Maybe you're not going to do well in school, and you'll do great in art; that's fine. It's another way to live a fulfilling and wonderful life, and one that's significant for other people as well as yourself. The whole idea is wrong in itself; it's creating something that's called 'economic man': the 'economic man' is somebody who rationally calculates how to improve his/her own status, and status means (basically) wealth. So you rationally calculate what kind of choices you should make to increase your wealth - don't pay attention to anything else - or maybe maximize the amount of goods you have.

What kind of a human being is that? All of these mechanisms like testing, assessing, evaluating, measuring...they force people to develop those characteristics. The ones who don't do it are considered, maybe, 'behavioral problems' or some other deviance [...] these ideas and concepts have consequences. And it's not just that they're ideas, there are huge industries devoted to trying to instill them...the public relations industry, advertising, marketing, and so on. It's a huge industry, and it's a propaganda industry. It's a propaganda industry designed to create a certain type of human being: the one who can maximize consumption and can disregard his actions on others.”
― Noam Chomsky

“A brilliant idea is like a baby in a mothers womb.
You need to bring it out in the world, nurture it, feed it, grow it, till it becomes big enough to take care of itself.
If you leave it at the stage of an idea itself, it is as good as non existent.”
― Manoj Arora, From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom

“Before Turner there was no fog in London.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Don't open the door to strangers," said her dad. "Unless they're selling something. Then open the door and see if I'd like it. If I'd like it, buy it for me. But nothing cheap. I have standards. Nothing too expensive, either. My standards aren't that high.”
― Derek Landy, The Dying of the Light

“Over his shoulder, she saw Skulduggery walk in. "Oh, hell," she muttered.
Wreath's smile reappeared. "It's Skulduggery, isn't it?"
Over his shoulder, she saw Skulduggery walk in. "Oh , hell," she muttered.
Wreath's smile reappeared. "It's Skulduggery, isn't it?"
"Please don't annoy him."
"Me? When have I EVER annoyed the great Skulduggery Pleasant?"
Skulduggery arrived at their table. Wreath smile up at him. "Hello."
"I will shoot you in the eye," Skulduggery said.
Wreath glanced at Valkyrie. "I think I've annoyed him.”
― Derek Landy, The Dying of the Light

“Asking where memory is "located" in the brain is like asking where running is located in the body. There are certainly parts of the body that are more important (the legs) or less important (the little fingers) in performing the task of running but, in the end, it is an activity that requires complex coordination among a great many body parts and muscle groups. To extend the analogy, looking for differences between memory systems is like looking for differences between running and walking. There certainly are many differences, but the main difference is that running requires more coordination among the different body parts and can be disrupted by small things (such as a corn on the toe) that may not interfere with walking at all. Are we to conclude, then, that running is located in the corn on your toe?”
― Ian Neath & Aimee Surprenant

“You deicde, and you make our night what you want. Brilliant and ours. Stupid and theirs.”
― Arthur Phillips, The Tragedy of Arthur

“All of us, at some point in life, get brilliant ideas...only a few of us have the courage to take the next step.”
― Manoj Arora, From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom

“Vincent had ten major ideas every week: three brilliant, five good, and two ridiculous.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

“Birth after birth the line unchanging runs,
And fathers live transmitted in their sons;
Each passing year beholds the unvarying kinds,
The same their manners, and the same their minds:Till, as erelong successive buds decay,
And insect-shoals successive pass away,
Increasing wants the pregnant parent vex
With the fond wish to form a softer sex. ..”
― Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature

“We're all just chemical hearts. Does that make love any less brilliant? I don't think so.”
― Krystal Sutherland, Our Chemical Hearts

“She was lost now, she'd been silenced- another dead branch on Cordova's warped tree.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“Skulduggery placed both hands on the table and leaned over. "You've heard about me. You've heard about the things I've done."
The smirk faded a little. "So?"
"So the stories you've heard are nothing compared to the truth, and the truth is nothing compared to what I'll do to you if something happens to Valkyrie. I'm the worst enemy you could ever make, Silas. Look at me and answer honestly, do you believe me?"
Nadir swallowed. "Yeah.”
― Derek Landy

“It's not the body that attracts me, it's the mind.
Beautiful bodies are seen around every corner. Brilliant minds are not. They are rare.
And they are often unique.”
― Augusto Branco

“IF YOU TREAT PEOPLE AS IF THEY ARE THE BRILLIANT PERSON THEY WILL BECOME IN 20 YEARS, THEY BECOME IT NOW.”
― Richie Norton

“It's not the body that attracts me, it's the mind.
Beautiful bodies are seen around every corner. Brilliant minds, no.
They are rare. And they are often unique.”
― Augusto Branco

“Show me the real you, then. And I'll make sure the world understands.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“Cotton is a brilliant, original, 'out of the box' thinker with command of his subject. Cotton's Microprediction is necessary reading for those whose success depends upon data-driven predictions.”
― joseph langsam, Handbook on Systemic Risk

“Madness is the only route towards genius.”
― Scarlet Jei Saoirse, Scarlosophy: Thinking Out Loud

“Kill a faerie, fall in love with a faerie, then be forced to kill a faerie to keep that love. It was brilliant and cruel, and she knew it.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

“You don’t have to be a brilliant writer; just don’t be boring.”
― Don Roff

“It’s not the genius of an idea that makes it great. Rather, it’s the courage to pursue it.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Eventually you have to decide what to do with this desire. Do you tamp it down in yourself, or do you chase after it? Should you quit your job to pursue your dream, or hang on to that steady paycheck? Stay in an okay relationship or find a better match? Do you plunge into a Technicolor riot of what might be, harsh and delirious and confusing? Or do you accept the humble beauty of ordinary life, where nothing ever changes, and everything is simple? Which will it be—Kansas or Oz? Life as it is or life as it could be?
Soon enough, life will offer you an answer. But for the moment, you are like Dorothy, sitting up in her bed, trying to decide which pair of slippers she wants to wear today. Black or ruby? Black or ruby? Until she decides, she’ll be caught in a maddening state of tension, trying to live in two worlds at once—padding around the farmhouse as it spins inside the twister, with rubies shining in her bloodstream, her auburn hair slowly turning gray.
Spare a thought for poor Dorothy, the orphan girl of Kansas, who dreams in color but lives in black and white.”
― John Koenig