Top 100 Quotes About Brilliant People
#1. New York seems to be absolutely filled with brilliant people.
Julian Ovenden
#2. 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
#3. I got brilliant stories from people who'd never set foot in an MFA program and had published very little, and terrible stories from people who'd published a lot and had all the credentials. It was all over the map and that was part of the fun.
Ben Fountain
#4. Unfortunately, we have warring in the world, so the youngest minds, the brilliant minds, are sent off to war. I think that, you know, you have brilliant people with great possibilities and that's why I really am not really for war. I really am not.
Stevie Wonder
#5. I can't think of anything worse than calling Shakespeare 'highbrow,' because on the one hand, it's brilliant writing. But his plays were popular. People went to see them.
Timothy Dalton
#6. It still hasn't sunk in that I'm going to be in Coronation Street. Everything about the role is brilliant and I'm working with some great people.
Richard Fleeshman
#7. A lot of things in history are timing, and it's very peculiar because in retrospect things [and] people can look more brilliant or necessary than they actually were.
Robert Greene
#8. Men must be decent first and brilliant later, otherwise you're not helping people, just servicing the machine.
Claire North
#9. I'm the joke of the family with cooking because I've never done it - primarily because I've been surrounded by people who are so good at it. Mum's brilliant. Boyfriends have always been good at it. I'm waiting for my inner chef to be released.
Emilia Fox
#10. It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing. It
Richard Feynman
#11. There were a number of people who helped me get there, and the one I always mention is Michael Byrne, the great master swordsman and brilliant stunt double.
Ian McDiarmid
#12. The Tucson speech [of Barack Obama] was brilliant, and I'm so angry at Republicans for jumping on him because you have to give credit. Part of being successful is to give credit to people who you may not disagree with when they do well.
Frank Luntz
#13. I think it's really rare to see women on television who are brilliant, selfish, vain, fallible - and I feel like I have all those capacities in myself, so it's good to see people in the media representing all of those things.
Kerry Bishe
#14. Drest had made a careful study of the Discordian philosophy and realized it was the kind of outlandish nonsense that would appeal to the kind of people who made all the trouble in history-brilliant, intellectual, slightly deranged dope fiends and oddball math-and-technology buffs.
Robert Anton Wilson
#16. I was living in Paris, which is a very beautiful, very wonderful place, but a tight place as a city, a tight place culturally. Its people are very brilliant, thoughtful, the place functions, but it's a historical place in some ways, like a big museum.
Nicolas Berggruen
#17. I am the most well-adjusted human being I know. I started out this investigation as a very happy man with a great career. I've got the life people dream about: I am rich, I am famous, I've got a fabulous marriage to an absolutely, spell-bindingly brilliant woman.
James Ellroy
#18. I had been a radical, a left-wing politico, and meeting the Indian people made me realize that the politics of the left and the right were so much less important than the politics of the heart and the spirit.
Larry Brilliant
#19. With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.
Stephen Jay Gould
#21. One Size Does Not Fit All Some of the most brilliant, creative people I know did not do well at school. Many of them didn't really discover what they could do - and who they really were - until they'd left school and recovered from their education.
Ken Robinson
#22. When you're surrounded by brilliant people it really is just easy to do your job.
Mathew Baynton
#23. I'm terrified of getting what I'm not deserving of, feeling that I've got something for nothing ... at the expense of brilliant starving writers all over the world. But I have to hope these people who are helping me have integrity.
Nick McDonell
#24. I want to do roles that take women a step farther. I don't want to be slotted into anything. But if I get a brilliant role which requires me to be a mother, then I will do it. But I want people to see that a woman could be anything at whatever age, even if she is married or has two kids.
Madhuri Dixit
#25. It isn't easy being a brilliant inventor, always alone. Always misunderstood. Easy to turn bitter, make horrible mistakes. People are more difficult to work with than machines. And when you break a person, he can't be fixed.
-Hephaestus
Rick Riordan
#26. Some people have great ideas maybe once or twice in their life, and then they discover electricity or fire or outer space or something. I mean, the kind of brilliant ideas that change the whole world.
Some people never have them at all ... I get them two or three times a week.
Neil Gaiman
#27. Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.
Paul Muldoon
#28. Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
Oscar Wilde
#29. History more often records the brilliant successes and spectacular defeats of contending forces than the effect of war on the common people.
Mildred Cable
#30. I cannot tolerate fools - won't have anything to do with them. I only want to associate with brilliant people.
Ida Lupino
#31. My social life is much better, since I stopped spending it with other people.
Ashleigh Brilliant
#32. The faster you get back to people, the less brilliant you have to be,
Helen Gurley Brown
#33. I have been working a lot, and I like it. And you know, it's hard for me not to. I guess I've been working a lot because I get to play with brilliant people.
Charlize Theron
#34. Create the kind of workplace and company culture that will attract great talent. If you hire brilliant people, they will make work feel more like play.
Richard Branson
#35. Ally McCoist, Kenny McDowall, Ian Durrant, Jim Stewart - all fantastic people. It is still a brilliant club for me, although technically it is now a new club
Terry Butcher
#36. I saw 'Sleeping Beauty' when I was, like, 6 years old at the Mercury Theatre. Then, when I came to Disney, I was in the company of these wonderful artists. People like Glen Keane, like Mark Henn, who were brilliant animators who could really bring these things to life.
John Musker
#37. ISIS is recruiting through the Internet. ISIS is using the Internet better than we are using the Internet, and it was our idea. What I wanted to do is I wanted to get our brilliant people from Silicon Valley and other places and figure out a way that ISIS cannot do what they're doing.
Donald Trump
#38. Not all crazy people are brilliant, but almost all brilliant people are crazy.
Chuck Klosterman
#39. The faults of a brilliant writer are never dangerous on the long run; a thousand people read his work who would read no other; inquiry is directed to each of his doctrines; it is soon discovered what is sound and what is false; the sound become maxims, and the false beacons.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#40. Look at the world of books nowadays. People just download books. They don't go to a bookstore. Amazon is wiping out Borders and Barnes and Noble. Those are brilliant examples of ephemeralization doing more with less at a better price.
Robert Kiyosaki
#41. You know, there's still a lot of great songwriters out there who hand in songs. And there's a lot of brilliant singers and performers out there who sing other people's words. I enjoy doing both.
Jason Mraz
#42. People who think they know what is going to happen next are fools. Surprises - or what the brilliant author Nassim Taleb calls 'Black Swans' - are inevitable. Some are likely to be desperately unpleasant too
Martin Wolf
#43. It's not all that important that you be able to originate brilliant ideas... The more important talent is to be able to recognize good ideas from other people.
Eric S. Raymond
#44. "You know, Mouse," Tabby said, "a brilliant cat like me should have smart friends; people who can count to more than four." "I can count to more than four," answered Mouse, very offended. "And I can do hard sums, and I know geography and history, and I can knit and ... "
Ruth Park
#45. He was neither rich nor great, young nor handsome, - in no respect what is called fascinating, imposing or brilliant; and yet he was as attractive as a genial fire, and people seemed to gather about him as naturally as about a warm hearth.
Louisa May Alcott
#46. Sydney in general is eclectic. You can be on that brilliant blue ocean walk in the morning and then within 20 minutes you can be in a completely vast suburban sprawl or an Italian or Asian suburb, and it's that mix of people, it's that melting pot of people that give it its vital personality.
Baz Luhrmann
#47. The treachery of the Inhumane society was controlled by one man. As a brilliant scientist, he could have saved the town, but instead he fed on the loneliness and discontent of the fading town, and pushed people in the direction hw thought was right.
Lemony Snicket
#48. Like so many brilliant people, he believes that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.
Peter F. Drucker
#49. I was lucky to get into computers when it was a very young and idealistic industry. There weren't many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were brilliant people from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. They loved it, and no one was really in it for the money.
Steve Jobs
#50. I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to be more likely to produce philosophers, people in the arts, unusually brilliant scientists.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#51. If you ask people if they enjoy crime novels, they'll say, 'Oh, my guilty pleasure is ... ' then name a really brilliant crime writer.
Sophie Hannah
#52. Intelligence people are no different from anybody else. They have preconceptions, and when they see them in real life, it reinforces how brilliant they think they are.
Tom Clancy
#53. Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.
Thomas Sowell
#54. When brilliant minds collide, they're ordained for greatness. When they form relationships with people they wouldn't have met, it opens up more connections with people who might collaborate on research projects that will change the world.
Colin Webb
#55. Lots of us when we're children believe 'oh well, if the world knew us as we really are, they'd know what wonderful, clever, brilliant, charming people we really are.'
Max Hastings
#56. People who live entirely by the fertility of their imaginations are fascinating, brilliant and often charming, but they should be sat next to at dinner parties, not lived with.
Scottie Fitzgerald Smith
#57. Some people are saying there's going to be a third World War. I hope not. I really think this is a time that people can start to mend things by negotiations, dealings. We know about dealings, don't we? We have brilliant lawyers. Why don't we have brilliant lawyers standing up and working for peace?
Yoko Ono
#58. I've got this brilliant thing where I go, 'I'm Robbie Williams', and people are interested in what I want to say - which is amazing because I'm just an idiot from Stoke-on-Trent.
Robbie Williams
#59. Why should I ever get fed up talking about my father? He was a brilliant, colorful man who left us with thousands of memories. Most people remember his films, but I've got anecdotes and advice and episodes of real life tucked away inside my head.
Danny Huston
#60. Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can't always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.
Charles Stross
#61. I meet people who use the term 'plant spirit' as a matter of course. Initially I thought they were all rather woo-woo, but as I met more brilliant, accomplished plant spirit thought leaders, my thoughts started to shift to, "What am I missing here?"
Zoe Helene
#62. We are fed lies because believing them makes us weak, vulnerable, malleable. We depend on others for our food, health, sustenance. This cripples us. Creates cowards of our people. Slaves of our children. It's time for us to fight back.
Tahereh Mafi
#63. Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not - because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized.
Ken Robinson
#64. Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.
Don DeLillo
#65. I don't want to sound arrogant and say that I know everything about directing and I've got it cracked, but it was just all in all a joyous experience. To me, the key to directing, to be honest, is just surround yourself with brilliant people and let them do their thing
Dan Mazer
#66. Some people are instantly brilliant. The Kenneth Branaghs of this world are ready-formed actors at 23 - he has used his success in lots of different ways - but there are people out there for whom acting is: 'Ooh, I can get on the telly and be famous.'
Harriet Walter
#67. I'm good at my job for a midwestern American. Maybe it's because people in fashion often mistake common sense for genius. I mean, some model walks down the runway in an impossible outfit, and I state the obvious ? no one is going to wear that ? and people are like, you're brilliant!.
David Wolfe
#68. The information I most want is in books not yet written by people not yet born.
Ashleigh Brilliant
#69. My life as an author has always been about brilliant, odd people.
David Lagercrantz
#70. People will think you brilliant
only if you tell them what they know.
To avoid being thought brilliant,
avoid knowing what they know.
Write to discover to yourself
what you know.
Anarchism is Not Enough
Laura Riding Jackson
#71. People keep referring to me as a standup, and that just doesn't sit well with me because a lot of my friends are standups and they're brilliant at writing jokes, and I'm not.
Nick Offerman
#72. I've been lucky that I've performed with a lot of the classical people I've wanted to work with so I'd like to do something that people didn't see coming. Like Madonna, or being Welsh - the Tom Jones thing. Or somebody suggested N-Dubz - that would be brilliant!
Katherine Jenkins
#73. 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
#74. Take heart! Many great things have been done by people in poor mental health.
Ashleigh Brilliant
#75. I found that Steve's passion for wildlife and willingness to lay his life on the line so exciting. What you have in our academic arena is a lot of people who are brilliant at what they do-and boring as the day is long.
Terri Irwin
#76. It's a strange thing, this idea that for some reason, if a lot of people like what you're doing, it's therefore not very good. We use the phrase that a band have 'sold out.' Just so you know, if you're doing a gig and you sell all your tickets, that is a brilliant thing to do.
James Corden
#77. If people can't tell when I'm being an idiot and when I'm being a genius, perhaps they'll assume my blunders are brilliant political maneuvers.
Brandon Sanderson
#78. Walking through the West Village one night, he had a eureka moment: He would make a gay bar, but for straight people. It was a brilliant idea. Soon after, he opened the first T.G.I. Friday's on the Upper East Side.
Moira Weigel
#79. He did it (listened) as the world's most charming and magnetic people do, always asking the right question at the right time, never fidgeting or taking his eyes from the speaker's face, making the other guy feel like the most knowledgeable, brilliant, and intellectually savvy person on the planet.
Stephen King
#80. These days people are much more aware that mathematics is a communal endeavor: even the most brilliant idea gets meaning only from its relation to the whole.
Dusa McDuff
#81. Tolkien was such a brilliant writer in so many ways. He was truly an inspiration. Many people don't realize just how much he researched and how much he based his stories and characters on mythology of various types. He was very deep and in many ways a genius.
Raymond Buckland
#82. To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#83. There's a lot of potential that goes unused in places like South Central L.A., a lot of brilliant, smart people who just don't have that chance to show it.
Ice Cube
#84. Amongst Indian celebrities, Shah Rukh is a great one to interview. He's a brilliant T.V. anchor, a people person, and enjoys talking.
Cyrus Broacha
#85. Daniel Radcliffe is one of the hardest working people I have ever encountered and someone that so loves what he's doing and so eager to learn and is so brilliant at what he does.
Juno Temple
#86. Edward was at the stage of drunkenness in which the ego glows like a coal, and brilliant people become more inspired, but in which dull people, fired by the same inspiration, become only more dull.
William Styron
#87. Despite his unimpressive appearance and manner, he was a brilliant fellow with a crystal-clear mind ... It was just that, when it came time for him to act like an executive, he was like a great many other people; when the time comes to make decisions, they have difficulty doing it.
Harry S. Truman
#88. My mother is brilliant but emotional and very much gregarious and connected to people. My father was brilliant but focused and driven and very narrow-casted.
Justin Trudeau
#89. I think I had a superb campaign team. And I know it's always expected that if you lose, people point to the campaign team and say, 'Gee, they didn't do their job well.' If you win, they're all brilliant. And the team, in my view, did a superb job.
Mitt Romney
#90. Brilliant lecturers shouldn't be wasted in lecture rooms: they should appear onTV. We need black market universities, in which people just help each other, and which don't leave out the poor.
Theodore Zeldin
#91. I no longer worry about being a brilliant conversationalist. I simply try to be a good listener. I notice that people who do that are usually welcome wherever they go
Frank Bettger
#92. Some people can find all the peace of mind they need in a good, satisfying conflict.
Ashleigh Brilliant
#93. Good ideas are common - what's uncommon are people who will work hard enough to bring them about.
Ashleigh Brilliant
#94. Like I said about Seinfeld and Chris Rock, they're a great combination of brilliance and hard work. [But] there are people who are brilliant and don't work hard, and there are people who are brilliant and sabotage themselves
Sarah Silverman
#95. What I enjoy is a collaboration. Working with other like-minded people. People who have brilliant minds and big hearts.
Julian Ovenden
#96. Young people seldom turn out as one predicts, so it is of little use to expect anything,' said Mrs. Meg with a sigh. 'If our children are good and useful men and women, we should be satisfied; yet it's very natural to wish them to be brilliant and successful.
Louisa May Alcott
#97. Not even a great leader can get very far without great people to lead.
Ashleigh Brilliant
#98. Colors shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only.
Haruki Murakami
#99. It is really rather foolish to so often feel we have to say something brilliant and enlightening to someone who is suffering. Job makes it clear that simple companionship is what suffering people often crave - not a course in philosophy.
Kathryn Lindskoog
#100. Fat people are brilliant in bed. If I'm sitting on top of you, who's going to argue?
Jo Brand
