a flash
Examples
The moment of recognizing your own lack of talent is a flash of genius.
Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.
Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.
The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.
Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.
He that has no fools, knaves, or beggars in his family was begot by a flash of lightning.