You Are Brilliant Quotes & Sayings

Make your purpose brilliant. Keep it clear. Seek to energize it with positives. Do not lumber up your plan. Centralize it. Modify it. Create it as a necessity. Form into it the indispensable. Then embody yourself into it. See that nothing about you defeats, or neutralizes attraction. Have a burning interest in your proposition. Look for fulfillment. Anticipate success. Make the world feel that you know you are right. Stop asking folks if they think you will succeed. Of course they do not, because they have not. Hold your mind relaxed in Silence. Make your desire active. Set your wishes in motion. Confidence attracts confidence. Positives attract positives. Bring out your latent forces, they only need arousing. THINK AND ACT. — Delmer Eugene Croft

You are brilliant. Low-self-esteem will never haunt you again. Be all that you can be. Know your purpose! Every trial will turn into a victory. You must speak that thing into existence and never give up. — Alisha Broughton

The thing I'm obsessed with is really great bad paintings. I have a storage locker full of them and I want to give them their own museum. You don't even know who these artists are - you can buy them at garage sales, antique stores and places like that. They're brilliant because they were done with the intention of being great, but the artist sort of made a wrong turn. Some of them are hilarious and I can't get enough of them. — Jennifer Coolidge

Mr. Irvine ... had given him advice: not
advice about how to think as much as advice about how to be, about how to be a curiosity in a world in which curiosities weren't often tolerated. "People are going to think certain things about you because of how you walk," Mr. Irvine had once said to him, and he had looked down. "No," he'd said. "Don't look down, Jude. It's nothing to be ashamed of. You're a brilliant man, and you'll be brilliant, and you'll be rewarded for your brilliance. But if you act like you don't belong, if you act like you're apologetic for your own self, then people will start to treat you that way, too." He'd taken a deep breath. "Believe me." Be as steely as you want to be, Mr. Irvine had said. Don't try to get people to like you. Never try to make yourself more palatable in order to make your colleagues more comfortable. — Hanya Yanagihara

I can't believe you can create such beauty."
"I can't believe I'm finally looking at my beauty. You can't see it, Lark. I know you can't. Maybe it's a girl thing or your shitty family or you do see it and are just fishing for compliments, but you are too beautiful to get right on paper. No matter how much I try," I said, cupping her face, "I can't make my art look nearly as perfect as you."
"Shit," she whispered. "Did you just think that up because it was fucking brilliant?"
Before I could answer, little Lark stepped up as far as she could on her tippy toes, pulled me down to her, and kissed me hard and deep. The girl claimed my breath like she'd already claimed my heart. No way was I imagining all of her wonderful qualities. I wasn't that damn creative. — Bijou Hunter

Brilliant. A very funny and concise explanation of why we men are as we are. If you are male, you should read it and then make your partner read it, so they will no longer hate you but pity you instead. — Harry Enfield

You're not a Black man. You're a human being in God's eyes. So when you sit down to talk to someone and you talk to them in really intelligent terms, you ask difficult questions, there's a militancy that's assigned to you without you asking for it, because you are simply judged by what you look like. If you're a white person asking the same questions, you'd be one of these CNN guys and say how brilliant he is. That doesn't work for you, because this is the world we live in. — James McBride

You do not need permission to be you. Just be your authentic, brilliant, one-soul-only self. You are a marvel. Act like it! — Toni Sorenson

Prodigies! Geniuses! Artists! The lumer-lumpen are some of the most sensitive, the most brilliant, the wisest creatures on the earth or inside of it. There is more wisdom in the head of a lumpen than you will find in all the libraries of the world ... If only they could speak ... — Lauren Oliver

There are probably brilliant people, geniuses, alive today who don't even know how to say, "Hello, how do you do?" because their minds are absorbed with electronic images. — Beth Henley

Those of you who are not aware of my brilliant career as a stand up comic, I'm not aware of it either so we might well wonder what we're doing here. — Alan Rickman

You don't necessarily have to go to film school to be a brilliant film maker. If you are a good listener and you study life, and you find that story that is buried within each and every one of us, and you figure out a way to bring that out. And sometimes it doesn't necessarily mean money or winning the lottery. — Tony Todd

To an Earthkeeper, love is not a feeling or something your barter with. Love is the essence of who you are, and it radiates from you as a brilliant aura: You become love, practice fearlessness, and attain enlightenment. — Alberto Villoldo

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

You're beautiful like a flower
More valuable than a diamond
You are powerful like a fire ...
There is nothing in the world that you cannot do
When you believe in you, who are beautiful
Yeah you, who are brilliant
Yeah you, who are powerful
Yeah you, who are resilient — India.Arie

It meant nothing. Some people are like that: everything comes out like a lie. Not that they're brilliant liars, just that they're useless at telling the truth. You get left with no way to tell what's the real fake and what's the fake one. — Tana French

The doctors are busy with the repulsive but beneficent work of amputation. You see the sharp, curved knife enter the healthy, white body, you see the wounded man suddenly regain consciousness with a piercing cry and curses, you see the army surgeon fling the amputated arm into a corner, you see another wounded man, lying in a litter in the same apartment, shrink convulsively and groan as he gazes at the operation upon his comrade, not so much from physical pain as from the moral torture of anticipation. - You behold the frightful, soul-stirring scenes; you behold war, not from its conventional, beautiful, and brilliant side, with music and drum-beat, with fluttering flags and galloping generals, but you behold war in its real phase - in blood, in suffering, in death. — Leo Tolstoy

He asked her, 'Why do you feel sorry for me, Old Woman?'
The Old Woman stood beside him and looked out the window at the Garden, so beautiful, flowering and everywhere illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, and said, 'I feel sorry for you, dear Youth, because I know where you are gazing and what you are waiting for. I feel sorry for you and your mother.'
Perhaps because of these words, or perhaps because of something else, there was a change in the Youth's mood. The Garden, flowering behind the high fence below his window, and exuding a wonderful fragrance, suddenly seemed somehow strange to him; and an ominous sensation, a sudden fear, gripped his heart with a violent palpitation, like heady and languid fragrances rising from brilliant flowers.
'What is happening?' he wondered in confusion.
("The Poison Garden") — Valery Bryusov

This is what is called speaking. I believe that is the term. When words come out, fly into the air, live for a moment, and die. Strange, is it not? I myself have no opinion. No and no again. But still, there are words you will need to have. There are many of them. Many millions, I think. Perhaps only three or four. Excuse me. But I am doing well today. So much better than usual. If I can give you the words you need to have, it will be a great victory. Thank you. Thank you a million times over. — Paul Auster

The more sure you are, the more wrong you can be. — Ashleigh Brilliant

By accepting you as you are, I do not necessarily abandon all hope of your improving — Ashleigh Brilliant

Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it's a poor substitute - you're working for people not yet born - and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it's their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud. — Damien Hirst

They are the fallen gods. The new gods are producers, creators, doers. The new gods are the chinless techno-children who would rather eat white sugar and watch science-fiction films than worry about what shoes they wear. And these poor souls desperately push papers around hoping that a mystical message will appear to save them from the new, awkward, brilliant gods and their silicon-chip reality. Some of them will survive, of course, but most will fall. Uncreative thinking is done better by machines. Poor souls, you can almost hear them sweating. — Christopher Moore

Are you prepared to be the complete Watson?" he asked.
"Watson?"
"Do-you-follow-me-Watson; that one. Are you prepared to have quite obvious things explained to you, to ask futile questions, to give me chances of scoring off you, to make brilliant discoveries of your own two or three days after I have made them myself all that kind of thing? Because it all helps."
"My dear Tony," said Bill delightedly, "need you ask?" Antony said nothing, and Bill went on happily to himself, "I perceive from the strawberry-mark on your shirt-front that you had strawberries for dessert. Holmes, you astonish me. Tut, tut, you know my methods. Where is the tobacco? The tobacco is in the Persian slipper. Can I leave my practice for a week? I can. — A.A. Milne

Raphael came through the door like a child's nightmare, his eyes glowing an almost solid silver with wrath, his gleaming fangs fully extended, blood painting his mouth a brilliant red, dripping from his chin to shine wetly against the tattered remains of his black shirt. His huge chest was heaving with the fury of his breath, and his hands curled into claws as his gaze found her and he growled a warning. 'Release her, human.'
'Who are you? the man rasped, fear taking away his breath, coarsening his voice.
'Release her.'
The man tightened his grip, 'Come closer and she dies.'
Rachael's mouth widened in a terrifying smile, 'You think to bargain with me? — D.B. Reynolds

And yours? What is your opinion? Truly?" She turned to face me, her green eyes brilliant in the lamplight. "Would it matter?"
"No. I love him and, damn the world, I will have him."
She grinned. "Good girl. And since my opinion doesn't matter, I give it freely: Brisbane is worth twenty Marches and dearer to me than most of my own brothers. If you do not marry him, I will do so myself, simply to keep him in the family."
I turned away quickly. "Are you weeping?" she asked.
"Don't be absurd." My voice was muffled and I swallowed, blinking furiously. "I have a cinder in my eye." Portia dropped a swift kiss to my cheek. "Happiness is within your grasp now, pet. Hang onto it, and do not let it go, whatever you do. — Deanna Raybourn

She's going to have to be more than smart. She'll have to be brilliant."
"She is. That's what makes her a pain in the ass."
"Stuck on her, are you?" David waved the comment away. "Sorry. Too personal."
"I was wondering if you were asking as a corporate suit, an associate or as the guy who's dating
her mother."
"I was aiming toward friend. — Nora Roberts

Is it you and I who are crazy, or is it everybody else? — Ashleigh Brilliant

What are you doing?" He flops down next to me. "Checking your email?
St. Clair snorts. "Give the lad a medal for his brilliant skills in detection. — Stephanie Perkins

I was worried that my brilliant good looks and easy manners would make me impossible to hate, thus ruining our fragile alliance. But this will be simple. Just tell me all the subjects you are an expert in, and I shall endeavor to explain them to you. — Courtney Milan

I'm not getting it all sorted, she worried. I'm not getting it right.
You are brilliant, the Voice reassured her.
It is imperfect.
So are all things trapped in time. You are brilliant, nonetheless. How fortunate for Us that We thirst for glorious souls rather than faultless ones, or We should be parched indeed, and most lonely in Our perfect righteousness. Carry on imperfectly, shining Ista. — Lois McMaster Bujold

You know what I was thinking? [Ruthie] got so excited when she was spouting this ahistorical countertextual nonsense, and I caught myself thinking, 'What an idiot her teacher must be,' and thinking about her teacher made me realize - the kind of excitement she was showing as she mindlessly spouted back the nonsense she learned in college, that's just like the excitement some of my own students show. And it occurred to me that what we professors think of as a 'brilliant student' is nothing but a student who is enthusiastically converted to whatever idiotic ideas we've been teaching them."
"Self-knowledge is a painful thing," said Esther. "To learn that your best students are parrots after all. — Orson Scott Card

You may think you see plenty of stars, friend reader, but you are wrong. Night is both blacker and more brilliant than you can imagine, and the sky a glory that puts to shame the most splendid jewels at Renwick's. — Marie Brennan

I like you because you are Kaitlyn - genuine, beautiful, brilliant, amazing Kaitlyn - not because you're Kaitlyn Parker. And I'm in love with you because I can't help myself. — Penny Reid

I think you're very brave," he whispered. "You're a fire that should burn itself out in five seconds of brilliant combustion. I know what it's like to put forth that much energy, and yet you do it night after night. And nobody - not marquesses nor guardians nor physicians, not the whole weight of society's expectations - can make you stop." She let out a sigh, a trembling sigh that had her lips brushing against his thumb. So much like a kiss. "If people want you to stop talking, or to stop dressing the way you do, or to change who you are, it's because you hurt their eyes. We've all been trained not to stare into the sun. — Courtney Milan

The captain was amusing. He said that he himself couldn't draw and proved his words by drawing his own house for his prisoner to see. It was just such a house as the babies drew in the kindergarten: a square box with four square windows, a door and two chimneys, each with a neat curl of smoke. "That's best I can do," said the Captain, laughing.
Max laughed with him for politeness' sake, though inwardly he was shocked that an important man like the Captain made a fool of himself. "Vater does not draw," he said kindly, "nor does Mutti; but they are both very keen on photography. Perhaps you are good at that?"
"Not brilliant," said the Captain. — Constance Savery

The lovely thing is, if Marvel had a Spider-Man movie over at Sony or something, they own the rights to the character, and the editors and producers make suggestions and get notes and things. But you're talking about Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman. They're two of the best people in the world. The notes are just things like, "This is absolutely brilliant." — Mark Millar

The key to getting a reputation for being brilliant is actually being brilliant, not just acting like you are. — Seth Godin

Listen, I'll share some of the wisdom I learned over the years. When you near the end of your life ... when you're a lonely old man ... you start realizing what your accomplishments are really worth. The most brilliant clue I ever deciphered, the millions I earned
even the microwavable burrito itself
sometimes I think I'd be willing to trade all of it for a single hug of someone who truly loves me. — Margaret Peterson Haddix

Google's a strange place. When I met Eric Schmidt, he said, "If you are kind to everybody, then you will make good decisions because people will give you good information, and if you are truthful to everybody, they will be truthful to you." That's what's different about Google. They screw up and make mistakes, but they genuinely mean the good stuff about "don't be evil." — Larry Brilliant

When you look at me that way, I feel so beautiful."
"You are beautiful." He signed deep in his chest. His hands slid up and down her arms, caressing her roughly. "So damned beautiful."
"So are you." She put a hand to his bare chest, tracing the defined ridges of his musculature. "Like a diamond. Hard and gleaming, and cut with all these exquisite facets. Inside ... pure, brilliant fire. — Tessa Dare

You are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always very well taken care of if you come from Iowa. — Gertrude Stein

It is not your passing thoughts or brilliant ideas so much as your plain everyday habits that control your life ... Live simply. Don't get caught in the machine of the world - it is too exacting. By the time you get what you are seeking your nerves are gone, the heart is damaged, and the bones are aching. Resolve to develop your spiritual powers more earnestly from now on. Learn the art of right living. If you have joy you have everything,so learn to be glad and contented ... Have happiness now. — Paramahansa Yogananda

There are faerie lights in Faerie - not the tiny paper lanterns that you might see strung up high upon a tree, and not the fat neon fireflies that sprinkle the forests at night - no, these lights are actually the beings themselves, visible as just a pinpoint of light, like stars on the sky, the etheric beings grace our world with fleeting sparks of brilliant radiance. — Gabriel Brunsdon

If you don't put the spiritual and religious dimension into our political conversation, you won't be asking the really big and important question. If you don't bring in values and religion, you'll be asking superficial questions. What is life all about? What is our relationship to God? These are the important questions. What is our obligation to one another and community? If we don't ask those questions, the residual questions that we're asking aren't as interesting. — Larry Brilliant

The Flight of Providence

To do what is right, we try
Against the odds, we try
You are not like us, they say
Stand down
We fight, and only God knows

For our right to exist
For the truth
We are manifest for this hour
We will not be silent
You are not like us, they say
Stand down
We fight, and only God knows

For our right to try
For our right to know
We are the human race
We will not be silent
You are not like us, they say
Stand down
We fight, and only God knows

For the truth
For our future
We are brilliant shades of light
We cannot be contained — David C. Riggins

In every artist's life, there comes a person who lifts the
curtain on creativity. It is the closest you come to seeing
me again.
The first time, when you emerge from the womb, I am a
brilliant color in the rainbow of human talents from which
you choose. Later, when a special someone lifts the curtain,
you feel that chosen talent stirring inside you, a bursting
passion to sing, paint, dance, bang on drums. And you are never the same. — Mitch Albom

I'm not saying that 'Twilight' is, you know, some brilliant Oscar-winner, it's not 'Dr. Zhivago.' It's not trying to be. Because it is a female fantasy. I would argue that it's actually a universal fantasy. Which is, the fantasy being to be loved and cherished for exactly who you are. — Melissa Rosenberg

If Edgar Allan Poe were alive today, his agent would be constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, 'Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What's the matter with you
are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this midlength 'Fall of the House of Usher' crap — Dean Koontz

Dude, you need to appreciate how goddamn gifted you are. You're so smart that I don't understand what you're talking about half the time, and we all know how brilliant I am." Finn winked. "Matty, you're amazing. — Jessica Park

I want to hold you close, to cherish and protect you, to draw you in until we are so close that I am lost within you, I want to take you to bed to watch the way your skin tightens benneth my fingers the way your body awakens under my touch. I want to trail kisses over you until you are lost in so much pleasure that way you don't know where you end and I begin.I want to tie you up and fk you until there is no doubt that you are mine. I want to dress you up and take you out and show you off this beautiful, vibrant, brilliant woman. Everything I have built, all my companies, all my billions, they have no value compared to you. So no Nikki I will not take chances with your safety. I will not fight. I will not be defied. You do not want to move in with me thats fine. I will move in with you! — J. Kenner

No. I never saw a bad girl. You're not bad, Ash. You've just been pretending to be someone else for so long. Just to make your parents happy and then Sawyer happy. The girl you really are is amazing. You're kind yet you've got spunk. You're brilliant but you never act superior. You're careful yet you know how to have fun and you're so incredibly sexy but you haven't got a clue. — Abbi Glines

Yes, it's unfortunate that we have been conditioned to see an alternative to motherhood as not normal. But you do all realise that some of the most brilliant women in the world don't have kids, right? Oprah, Gloria Steinem, Helen Mirren, Dolly Parton? Do you think their lives carry an air of tragedy because they never had children? I don't. I'm sure they all had different reasons for not doing it, some maybe couldn't, some didn't want to, but these women's lives are not empty because of that. I think it's important we take the lead from our heroes and for everyone to stop valuing women on whether they do, or do not, become mothers. The irony of yours and your listeners' opinions is that it is you boxing women in to these roles, not men. It's highly un-feminist of you.' She — Dawn O'Porter

I did drugs for 18 years and I never got that bad as to say, 'You know what? I think the Kaiser Chiefs are brilliant.' — Noel Gallagher

Even the most brilliant accomplishments on the Internet are essentially cold. Google has changed the world, but you don't snuggle up to it. YouTube is a giant carnival, filled with freaks and mountebanks, a place to gawk and laugh and get bored. Certainly not a place to feel anything. — Marshall Herskovitz

Even when writing your own poems, you need to talk to people; you need to magpie around, getting words and things. I'm very against the celebrity culture that wants to say: 'this is a genius, this is one person who has done something brilliant.' There are always a hundred people in the background who have helped to make it. — Alice Oswald

The better you are as a parent, the richer the nest you've built, the more difficult it is for your kids to leave. So they have to invent things to dislike about you. And they're brilliant at it. — Dustin Hoffman

Who are you not to be great? You, with the imagination of a brilliant child and the powers of an ancient god.
Who are you to be ordinary? You, who can resend life or raise the dead.
Who are you to be afraid? You, who can serve as judge and jury while hoarding infinite lives.
Who are you to be a slave to the past? You who can travel time like the oceans or rewrite history with a single word.
Who are you to be anonymous? You whose names should be spoken in reverend tones or terrified whispers.
And who are you to deny greatness? If you would deny it to yourself, you deny it to the entire world.
And we will not be denied. — Official PlayStation Greatness Awaits Trailer

People always confuse intelligence with rational thinking and skepticism. I think it's a big mistake to assume anyone that follows a cult, religion, political party we don't like, etc is "stupid." But it's fair to say that if you follow something irrational, you are acting irrationally (at least as it pertains to that one specific act.) People can be smart - even brilliant - without necessarily being rational. Sometimes it's easy for people to be skeptical to most things, but with one or two glaring blind spots. If you don't spend a good portion of time playing devil's advocate with your own dearly held beliefs, odds are that there will be at least a couple of them that are irrational, even if you're one of the smartest people around. — Jon Moore

What the hell are you doing up there?'
So he slipped, of course, because he was startled, and because fate, having been so kind to him as to award him this ecstasy, retributively was going to kill him now. He lost his footing and grabbed for the chimney but missed. Head over thighs he rolled out like a child's toy, smashed into the poking branches of the damn pear tree, which probably saved his life, breaking his fall. He landed with a thud on a bed of lettuces, and the wind was knocked out of him, mortifyingly so, through all available orifices.
Oh, brilliant,' said the voice. 'The trees are dropping their fruits early this year. — Gregory Maguire

You are Brilliant and the Earth is Hiring — Paul Hawken

Brilliant, inspiring ... if you are on a pursuit of self-mastery, make time to read this! — Jennifer Lacy

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION How much work did you do today that you will be proud of tomorrow? I don't mean just how you handled the big things, but also how you addressed the little, seemingly insignificant ones. Did you make progress on what matters most to you, or did you allow the buzz, busyness, and expectations of others to squelch your passion and focus? I've been asking these questions of others and myself each day for more than a decade, and they are the main reason I originally felt compelled to write Die Empty. Through my work I've encountered many teams of brilliant, sharp, amazing, talented people who have at some point "settled in" or begun coasting on past success. Unfortunately, — Todd Henry

Day leans in toward me. He reaches up to touch my face. I can tell it still hurts him to use his fingers, and his nails are dark with dried blood. "You're brilliant," he says. "But you're a fool to stay wish someone like me."
I close my eyes at the touch of his hand. "Then we're both fools. — Marie Lu

I have long admired the visceral storytelling and moral complexity of John Vaillant's brilliant non-fiction about humankind's tragically ambivalent relationship with the natural world. Now he brings his abundant literary gifts to a debut novel set in a very real borderland in which human beings are themselves treated like animals. The Jaguar's Children is a beautifully rendered lament for an imperiled culture and the brave lives that would preserve it. You should read it. — John Burnham Schwartz

You are unique, you are brilliant and most of all, you are breathtaking! — Lori Bolen

Ma'am is yet another horrible-sounding word in the lexicon of words that women are stuck with to describe various aspects of their body/life/mental state/hair. Vagina. Moist. Fallopian tubes. Yeast infection. Clitoris. Frizz. These are all terrible words, and yet they are our assigned descriptors. Who made up these words? Women certainly didn't. If, at the beginning of time, right after making vaginas, God had asked me, 'What would you like your most intimate and enjoyable part of yourself to be called?',' I most certainly wouldn't have said, 'Vagina.' No woman would, because vagina sounds like a First World War term that was invented to describe a trench that has been mostly blown apart but is still in use. Even off the very top of my head I feel like I could have come up with something better, like for instance the word papoose, which actually as I'm typing it feels like an incredibly brilliant word for vagina. — Jessi Klein

And this time as the lashes come, try to think about the pain, instead of against it, because there is not one single aspect of life, past, present, or future, that does not tear your reason from you, to think on it. So think about the pain. This pain after all has its limits. You can chart its passage through your body. It has a beginning, middle, end. Imagine if it had a color. The first cut of the lash is what, red? Red, spreading into a brilliant yellow. And this one again, red, red, no yellow, and then white, white, white, white ... Why have you incarcerated yourself in this palazzo of torture chambers, why do you not leave this place? Because you are a monster and this is a school for monsters, and if you leave here, then you will be completely, completely alone! Alone with this!
Don't weep in front of these strangers. Swallow it down. Don't weep in front of these strangers! Cry to heaven, cry to heaven, cry to heaven. — Anne Rice

There are so many brilliant, trained actors of color in America. If you just think about it, every year in the spring Julliard and NYU and Yale and hundreds of schools across the country graduate classes of trained actors, and in those classes are actors of color. So to say that there aren't enough actors of color is factually inaccurate. — Andre Holland

There they are.
The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white, again yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, of the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere dissipated in elegant trifles. But durability exists independently of our admiration. Although the beauty is sufficiently humane to weaken us, to stir the deep deposit of mud - memories, abandonments, regrets, sentimental devotions - the Parthenon is separate from all that; and if you consider how it has stood out at night, for centuries, you begin to connect the blaze (at midnight the glare is dazzling and the frieze almost invisible) with the idea that perhaps it is beauty alone that is immortal. — Virginia Woolf

People that are brilliant and successful, we think they've just always been that way. That's not the case. Most of them have had some tough adversity in their life. It's prepared them. I've never felt like you could develop character without adversity. — Bobby Bowden

You are lovely, brilliant, witty ... the incredible words which would relieve her of any need to repay him or refuse his gifts; loveliness and wit were priced higher than any gift he offered, while if a girl were loved, even old women of hard experience would admit her right to take and never give. — Graham Greene

It doesn't take a brilliant mind to notice that adults are telling you what to do and then they do the opposite. I mean, I can't recall every stupid thing that adults were doing when I was six or seven. Some of it was the religious restrictions, where there were certain things that you were allowed to do and certain things that you weren't allowed to do, and I couldn't make sense of those things. — Al Jaffee

In snowboarding, you're constantly aware that people are so technically brilliant at what they do, and you feel like, "Ugh, I'll never be able to do that." — Cary Fukunaga

That's brilliant."
"I thought so. But I'm glad you agree. It will make this journey much more pleasant if you are impressed with my brilliance. — Sarah Beth Durst

You'll always make mistakes and you'll miss the mark sometimes. That's inevitably going to happen, because the best people in the world make mistakes - even people who are brilliant. — James Corden

You are an unusual, brilliant child who has not seen enough of life to grasp the full measure of human stupidity. — Ayn Rand

Are you prepared to have quite
obvious things explained to you, to ask futile questions, to give me
chances of scoring off you, to make brilliant discoveries of your own
two or three days after I have made them myself all that kind of thing? — A.A. Milne

People often say to me - how clever you are! How brilliant to be able to go from ballet to theatre as you do. I answer that it is not clever at all. It is the gift of looking at oneself coolly, of calculating the future objectively. I could see the danger signals as far as ballet was concerned before anyone else did, that's all. — Robert Helpmann

Women are so strong and knowledgeable. You know, instead of competing with each other, I would love to complete each other. Take away that wall of competition and say, 'Hey, let's just all get together and help each other be brilliant.' — Marie Osmond

Some changes are so slow, you don't notice them, others are so fast, they don't notice you. — Ashleigh Brilliant

Perez Hilton is brilliant to me. Because he's taken something that people don't think is valid, don't think is important, and he's made them obsessed with it. People are obsessed with him. They're obsessed with his site, they're obsessed with what he does. They love him. They all love him. They love you, they hate you, what you don't want is indifference. The day that I put a record out that nobody says a damn thing about, that's bad. — Lady Gaga

Rock 'n' roll is a young form. People over twenty- five ruin it. This whole censorship thing has come about because old people are playing with a form that is essentially young and rebellious. Do you know how brilliant it was for The Beatles to break up when they did?. — John Hughes

Fat people are brilliant in bed. If I'm sitting on top of you, who's going to argue? — Jo Brand

When you are the Spirit, you are like a brilliant diamond, which is giving light by itself. — Nirmala Srivastava

We know they are doing their job in committee, that they are brilliant men, smart men, and that they are on the job all the time. We're just human beings down here-all different. We take all these things into consideration. You can't help it. — John William McCormack

Like every artist that comes out, you want to make a mark; you want to be a household name and you want to be someone that people are going to look back in ten years/fifteen years' time and go, 'I love this guy Olly Murs. He was brilliant back in the day; he was someone I really, really liked.' — Olly Murs

The biggest thing about growing up in Canada is you know that Los Angeles and New York are not the only places in the world. They're not the only places where brilliant acting happens. — Alison Pill

I tried to go to sleep with my headphones still on, but then after a while my mom and dad came in, and my mom grabbed Bluie from the shelf and hugged him to her stomach, and my dad sat down in my desk chair, and without crying he said, 'You are not a grenade, not to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can't know, sweetie, because you've never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.'
'Okay,' I said.
'Really,' my dad said. 'I wouldn't bullshit you about this. If you were more trouble than you're worth, we'd just toss you out on the streets.'
'We're not sentimental people,' Mom added, deadpan. 'We'd leave you at an orphanage with a note pinned to your pajamas. — John Green

Some actors are brilliant in David Mamet, but they would crash and burn in my plays and visa-versa. You either have my music in your body, or you don't. — John Patrick Shanley

You are an exceptional, talented, and brilliant young woman. Do not ever let anyone make you feel like you're less. Do not ever let anyone make you feel invisible. Do not let anyone - not even a teacher who constantly sends you for coffee - push you around. — Richelle Mead

He continued. "So I shall simply tell you the truth. I have spent my entire life preparing for a cold, unfeeling, unimpassioned life - a life filled with pleasantries and simplicity. And then you came into it . . . you . . . the opposite of all that. You are beautiful and brilliant and bold and so very passionate about life and love and those things that you believe in. And you taught me that everything I believed, everything I thought I wanted, everything I had spent my life espousing - all of it . . . it is wrong. I want your version of life . . . vivid and emotional and messy and wonderful and filled with happiness. But I cannot have it without you.
"I love you, Juliana. I love the way you have turned my entire life upside down, and I am not certain I could live without you now that I have lived with you. — Sarah MacLean

I have a good friend, Rudolf Serkin, the pianist, a very sensitive man. I was talking to him one day backstage after a concert and I told him that I thought he had played particularly sensitively that day. I said, "You know, many pianists are brilliant, they strike the keys so well, but somehow you are different." "Ah," he said, "I don't think you should ever strike a key. You should pull the keys with your fingers." — Andrew Wyeth

Take a brilliant, creative social scientist, without any respect for conventional wisdom and you get Ellen Langer. She is a fantastic storyteller, and Counterclockwise is a fascinating story about the unexpected ways in which our minds and bodies are connected. — Dan Ariely

The city you speak of will be built - will stand in all its undeserved serenity - on the bones of a billion unjust, unremembered deaths. Its foundation stones are mortared with the blood of ten thousand suffering generations that no one there recalls or cares about. Its citizens live out their safe, butterfly lives in covered gardens and brilliant halls without the slightest idea or interest in how they came to have it all. She comes abruptly back to the here and now. Turns and flashes him a hard little smile. Do you really think that you could stand to live among such people? — Richard K. Morgan

If you have something to say and say nothing, you are really telling a lie. — Ashleigh Brilliant

AUGUST 25 A Special Angel By Maria Gillard Thank you for my childhood, for my laughing heart and soul for all your magic, and for being bold Thank you for being my mom's best friend and loving me no matter what state I was in Thanks for chives and roses, popcorn and TV Thanks for always letting me be me Thanks for rides to swim meets and yummy chocolate cake Thanks for being strong and true when my heart was aching Thank you for the blankets and pillow for my head Thank you for the back hill and the Westside River bed Thank you for the smell of melting butter on the stove Thank you for the nickels you gave me for the store You were a special angel sent to all of us with your disguise of freckles, kisses, hugs and guts We know you're out there somewhere and you'll stay inside our dreams We know wherever you are there's a brilliant golden beam Watch over us, dear angel, as you go on your way and we will laugh and sing and dance again someday Amen — Cathleen O'Connor

When you're still, and some actors are really brilliant at that, you bring a kind of energy to you as opposed to sending the energy out. There are some actors, like Gary Cooper or Kevin Spacey, that are absolutely brilliant - Gene Hackman is another - at being and allowing the audience to just do the work. — Gabriel Byrne

Ned looked to DeVere. "You are the master of mayhem. Any brilliant ideas?"
"If we want him to leave the gate, we must provide proper motivation," DeVere answered.
"Such as?" Phoebe prompted.
"Let us keep to the basics, my pet. Men are primarily moved by either their stomachs or their cocks. If we cannot tempt the one, it must be the other."
Ned glared. "What are you suggesting?"
"Our little chambermaid can take the blighter off by offering him a hand job."
"The hell she will!" Ned barked before Phoebe could answer for herself. "Think of something else!"
"Come now, Ned. She'll be well compensated for her trouble. He laughed. "Hell, for a thousand, I might be tempted to do it myself."
A WILD NIGHT'S BRIDE — Victoria Vane

Success in L.A. is completely arbitrary. One day you're the brilliant genius of life, the next day people act like there's a bad smell when you approach. Lots of expensive, late-model cars are offered in the L.A. Times every day by people who have suddenly begun to smell bad. The stakes are just too high for human dignity. — Cynthia Heimel