brilliance

Some things are so silly they have a certain brilliance to them. Other things, set as standards for brilliance and therefore exalted by many who don't know why, become tarnished because of it.

Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.

There is no such thing as a person without brilliance.

If everyone had the luxury to pursue a life of exactly what they love, we would all be ranked as visionary and brilliant. _ If you got to spend every day of your life doing what you love, you can__ help but be the best in the world at that. And you get to smile every day for doing so. And you__l be working at it almost to the exclusion of personal hygiene, and your friends are knocking on your door, saying, __on__ you need a vacation?!,_ and you don__ even know what the word __acation_ means because what you__e doing is what you want to do and a vacation from that is anything but a vacation _ that__ the state of mind of somebody who__ doing what others might call visionary and brilliant.

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

To observe is not to not feel__n fact, it is to put yourself at the mercy of feeling, like the child's warm skin meeting the cold air of midnight. My own children, too, have been roused from the unconsciousness of childhood; theirs too is the pain and the gift of awareness. 'I have two homes,' my daughter said to me one evening, clearly and carefully, 'and I have no home.' To suffer and to know what it is that you suffer: how can that be measured against its much-prized opposite, the ability to be happy without knowing why?

[He] was a brilliant man. People tend to become wary of individuals like him because their brilliance reminds them of their own mediocrity. Envy is a blind man who wants to pull out your eyes.

Another savage trait of our time is the disposition to talk about material substances instead of about ideas. The old civilisation talked about the sin of gluttony or excess. We talk about the Problem of Drink--as if drink could be a problem. When people have come to call the problem of human intemperance the Problem of Drink, and to talk about curing it by attacking the drink traffic, they have reached quite a dim stage of barbarism. The thing is an inverted form of fetish worship; it is no sillier to say that a bottle is a god than to say that a bottle is a devil. The people who talk about the curse of drink will probably progress down that dark hill. In a little while we shall have them calling the practice of wife-beating the Problem of Pokers; the habit of housebreaking will be called the Problem of the Skeleton-Key Trade; and for all I know they may try to prevent forgery by shutting up all the stationers' shops by Act of Parliament.

To write about him is to write about Greatness. To discuss him is todiscuss Intellectual Brilliance. To think of him is to think of Modesty,Simplicity and Lucidity. To remember him is to remember Nationalism atits finest hour. He was not one of those who merely achieved greatnessnor certainly one of those upon whom greatness was thrust-he was infact born great.

Your opinion of your mental capacity may be great, but if your idea of intelligence is crude, your intelligence-producing thought will also be crude, and can produce only crude intelligence. It is therefore evident that to simply think that you are brilliant will not produce brilliancy, unless your understanding of brilliancy is made larger, higher and finer. _. When your thinking is brilliant, you will be brilliant, but if your thinking is not brilliant you will not be brilliant, no matter how brilliant you may think you are.

If God wants something from me, he would tell me. He wouldn't leave someone else to do this, as if an infinite being were short on time. And he would certainly not leave fallible, sinful humans to deliver an endless plethora of confused and contradictory messages. God would deliver the message himself, directly, to each and every one of us, and with such clarity as the most brilliant being in the universe could accomplish. We would all hear him out and shout "Eureka!" So obvious and well-demonstrated would his message be. It would be spoken to each of us in exactly those terms we would understand. And we would all agree on what that message was.