“The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament.”

Nothing is so fragile as thought in its infancy; an interruption breaks it: nothing is so powerful, even to overturning empires, when it reaches its maturity.

It is the nature of thought to find its way into action.

When all else is lost, the future still remains.

Courage enlarges, cowardice diminishes resources.

Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil.

A woman’s love, like lichens upon a rock, will still grow where even charity can find no soil to nurture itself.

Something of a person’s character may be observed by how they smile. Some never smile they only grin.

The loveliest faces are to be seen by moonlight, when one sees half with the eye and half with the fancy.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

The greatest happiness comes from the greatest activity.

Whether one talks well depends very much upon whom he has to talk to.

Few minds wear out; more rust out.

Heaven lent you a soul, Earth will lend a grave.

Within the sacred walls of libraries we find the best thoughts, the purest feelings, and the most exalted imaginings of our race.

Economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.

Excellence in art is largely the result of attention to minutiae, and–prayer.

Drawing Dead is a brilliant noir from one of Australia’s most exciting new novelists.

We don’t have to be brilliant.

Most of what you encounter when you meet a man is a facade, an elaborate fig leaf, a brilliant disguise.

I have some ideas on how to fix that.

It’s by a brilliant reporter named David Holthouse.

All great men have declared that they owe their sucess to the aid and encouragement of some brilliant woman.

I can hear of the brilliant accomplishments of any of my sex with pleasure and rejoice in that liberality of sentiment which acknowledges them.

The process of re-writing and writing and re-writing means that you may have a brilliant phrase, but over time it distills and distorts and changes.