Simple Brilliance Quotes & Sayings

Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief. With faith you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling. — Yann Martel

Great minds had rather deserve contemporaneous applause without obtaining it, than obtain without deserving it. If it follow them it is well, but they will not deviate to follow it. — Charles Caleb Colton

When children are stripped of a primary experience base as confinement schooling must do to justify its existence, the natural sequence of learning is destroyed, a sequence which puts experience first. — John Taylor Gatto

A society which abandons children and the elderly severs its roots and darkens its future. — Pope Francis

Morphy gained most of his wins by playing directly and simply, and it is simple and logical method that constitutes the true brilliance of his play, if it is considered from the viewpoint of the great masters. — Jose Raul Capablanca

She tended to be impatient with that sort of intellectual who, for all his brilliance, has never been able to arrive at the simple conclusion that to be reasonably happy you have to be reasonably good. — Carolyn Kizer

I've been on planes flying through thunder storms when the pilot says, 'ladies and gentlemen, we tried to fly around it but we can't so it's going to be rough'.And when a pilot says it's going to be bad, it's going to be rough. And you say to youself, boy, I could have got the train. — Muhammad Ali

F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel
for theeighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions
did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment. — Angela Carter

Chickens are true creatures of zen - they live only and absolutely for the moment. Their actions one particular second will not necessarily have any influence or bearing on their actions in the next second, nor are they necessarily influenced by their actions of the prior second. Chicken thoughts arrive in their tiny mad little minds like flashes of a strobe light, each light being an action, each flashing with the brilliance of a not very brilliant thing. Each action utterly random. The complete randomness of chaos. Chickens are notorious escape artists, not due to their ability to devise cunning plans as they huddle together in their coop beneath a bare light bulb, scratching out complex diagrams in the dirt, but simply out of sheet unpredictability. They are the pachinko balls of the animal kingdom, effecting their escapes through the simple device of, say, turning left for no particular reason. — Jeffery Russell

She, Laura, likes to imagine (it's one of her most closely held secrets) that she has a touch of brilliance herself, just a hint of it, though she knows most people probably walk around with similar hopeful suspicions curled up like tiny fists inside them, never divulged. She wonders, while she pushes a cart through the supermarket or has her hair done, it the other women aren't all thinking, to some degree or other, the same thing: Here is the brilliant spirit, the woman of sorrows, the woman of transcendent joys, who would rather be elsewhere, who has consented to perform simple and essentially foolish tasks, to examine tomatoes, to sit under a hair dryer, because it is her art and her duty. — Michael Cunningham

The more a child is abused, the more the child uses his abilities to anticipate, manage, prevent, dismantle, and challenge the abusing ways of his parents. — Steven Franssen

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

You are a dear soul who plays polo, and I am a poor Pole who plays solo. — Ignacy Jan Paderewski

I just love to fight. I like to hurt people. I haven't lost that. I didn't lose it when I first got a bit of wealth and I haven't lost it now. The nature of my business is to hurt people. — Mike Tyson

I was a prefect at school, I never had a tattoo, got a detention or pierced my ears more than once. — Amanda Holden

He deconstructed things in his head," I said slowly. "Then he put them back together in a way I could understand. Brilliance is seeing what others can't and rendering it simple. — Stephanie Kegan

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

Boys annoyed her. Girls annoyed her. She should have been a cat. — Katie Neipris

Success means being satisfied with what you do every day. It's being proud of the better person you are becoming. — Dwyane Wade

She was also mad. Loopy as a crochet convention. — Jim Butcher