Cleverness Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 Cleverness Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
Where there is simplicity, there are a hundred Angels, but where there is cleverness - there are none.— Ambrose Of Optina
Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead. It is such a willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man.— Richard Rohr
In truth, real fame is never usurped; it only has a sense, a value and duration when it is turned to a good cause. And your victory is in the fact that you have human generosity and spontaneity that are not inhibited by rules or cleverness but stem from your own sufferings, your joys, hopes and disappointments; all that is understood by those who suffer beyond their strength and ask for pity, and who constantly hope to be comforted, to be made to forget for a moment, by that laughter which does not pretend to cure, but only to console.— Charlie Chaplin
Revolutionary men with principles were not really different from the rest. They used their cleverness to get, in return for principles, what other men buy with their money.— Nawal El Saadawi
They tried to be too clever— Agatha Christie
and that was their undoing.
Major Strasser: You give him (Rick Blaine) credit for too much cleverness. My impression was that he's just another blundering American. Captain Renault: We musn't underestimate American blundering. I was with them when they blundered into Berlin in 1918.— Humphrey Bogart
I kept bugging them about making it more upscale, because I felt Abby, through her cleverness and business sense, was a character who would move up. And that's what she did.— Donna Mills
You may not be the person with high IQ, but you can be the person with highest hard work.— Amit Kalantri
Life was not easy, nor was it happy, but she did not expect life to be easy, and, if it was not happy, that was woman's lot. It was a man's world, and she accepted it as such. The man owned the property, and the woman managed it. The man took credit for the management, and the woman praised his cleverness. The man roared like a bull when a splinter was in his finger, and the woman muffled the moans of childbirth, lest she disturb him. Men were rough of speech and often drunk. Women ignored the lapses of speech and put the drunkards to bed without bitter words. Men were rude and outspoken, women were always kind, gracious and forgiving.— Margaret Mitchell
Sometimes one 'needs' to use cleverness and kick wisdom aside.It's not everything that needs the application of wisdom, cleverness has a role to play. Andby the fact that one knows when to use cleverness and kick wisdomaside, is another wisdom of its own.— Emmanuel Aghado
Cleverness, as usual, takes all the credit it possibly can. But it's not the clever mind that's responsible when things work out. It's the mind that sees what's in front of it, and follows the nature of things.— Benjamin Hoff
In the past, my brain babbling at such length had meant there was something it either didn't want to think about— C.E. Murphy
which things numbered in the dozens right now
or it was working out some extreme cleverness that would at any moment leap out and surprise me. Much to my dismay, nothing leapt out.
Those who have no real virtue within but outwardly rely on flowery cleverness are like leaky boats brightly painted - if you put manikins in them and set them on dry ground they look all right, but once they go into the rivers and lakes, into the wind and waves, are they not in danger?— Shambhala Publications
I hate clever-cleverness, but I love good honest cleverness.— Tobias Hill
The art of investment has one characteristic that is not generally appreciated. A creditable, if unspectacular, result can be achieved by the lay investor with a minimum of effort and capability; but to improve this easily attainable standard requires much application and more than a trace of wisdom. If you merely try to bring just a little extra knowledge and cleverness to bear upon your investment program, instead of realizing a little better than normal results, you may well find that you have done worse.— Benjamin Graham
Whoever possesses abundant joy must be a good man: but he is probably not the cleverest man, although he achieves exactly what it is that the cleverest man strives with all his cleverness to achieve.— Friedrich Nietzsche
Comforting Wealth comes by good work, by wisdom it increases, cleverness stabilizes it and by patience it is preserved.— Mahesh Babu
Christ, I walk through an inferno unscatched, then singe my ass on the flight back."— Brian K. Vaughan
[ ... ]
"You guys are the ... the heart and brain of the Great Machine."
"Yeah? Then you're the inflamed anus."
"You're not the brain, by the way.
He was the kind of boy for whom cleverness was female.— Margaret Atwood
Cleverness, he thinks, will get you nowhere; it is only the stupid, the brilliantly stupid, who will inherit the earth.— Ian McGuire
You are a man with secrets ... and I plan to know them all.— Pauline Creeden
This is where we are at right now, as a whole. No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.— Bill Hicks
We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow, and courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of them ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit.— Tom Brown Jr.
Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.— Thomas Huxley
We are a species of animal which is bringing about the end of the world we were born into. Not out of evil or malice, or not mainly, but because of a lopsided mixture of extraordinary cleverness, extraordinary greed, extraordinary proliferation of our own kind, and a biologically built-in short-sightedness.— A.S. Byatt
Courage, not cleverness; not even inspiration, is the grain of mustard that grows up to be a great tree.— Ludwig Wittgenstein
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.— Bertrand Russell
Regardless of our cleverness, our achievements, and our gadgets, we are spiritual paupers without God.— Billy Graham
Always keep your foes confused. If they are never certain who you are or what you want, they cannot know what you are like to do next.— George R R Martin
Never treat somebody's cleverness as his life's smartness. Cleverness is to hide the weakness and the smartness is to project the strength of his weakness.— Anuj
Unlike Champions, Godmothers don't have to keep undergoing ridiculous ordeals every time one turns around. Our idea of besting a dragon is not to chop it into bits, but to get it to sit down to tea.— Mercedes Lackey
He robbed him of a great deal of his natural force, and so do all those who try to turn books written in verse into another language, for, with all the pains they take and all the cleverness they show, they never can reach the level of the originals as they were first produced.— Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
Every significant human project gets perverted for the— Kenn Brody
advancement of some individual or group. It seems impossible to get rational
direction for more than a few moments, and then that direction is lost. And yet, here
you are. What we did not understand is that humans have an uncanny gift for
invention, imagination, and cleverness. No other sentients are quite so gifted. You
also show altruistic charity in times of crisis.
So I want to identify, if I can, the most important thing that we discover in life. At least, it is the most important thing that I have discovered. I will share it with you, like a precious jewel, fit for this occasion. I refer to love. Love for one another. Love for our community. Love for others everywhere in the world. Love transcends even scholarship, cleverness and university degrees. It is greater than pride and wealth. It endures when worldly vanities fade ...— Michael Kirby
The case against intellect is founded on a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly and diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism ... . Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect ... is lost.— Charles P. Pierce
The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve.— Francois De La Rochefoucauld
Two ways of thinking: Human kingdom and human cleverness or God's kingdom and God's cleverness— Dallas Willard
A hero called Adin rose from the ranks of the people. He was an ordinary man, a blacksmith who made swords and armor and shoes for horses. But he had been blessed with strsngth, courage, and cleverness.— Emily Rodda
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.— Hannah Arendt
Harry - you're a great wizard, you know."— J.K. Rowling
"I'm not as good as you," said Harry, very embarrassed, as she let go of him.
"Me!" said Hermione. "Books! And cleverness! There are more important things - friendship and bravery and - oh Harry - be careful!
I'm accused of cleverness as if it were a sin. She is merely clever, they say.— Jennifer Stone
Skyler often thought that the Seneca quotation Poe included was a dig at Dupin-or perhaps Poe himself: Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio. "Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness." "That's for sure," said Skyler aloud. "Or more succintly put, 'No one likes a smart ass'.— Haley Walsh
I have never been to a court s gracious as the one Neha keeps. Dmitri played a knife through his fingers, one of the three he'd brought back from Neha's territory. "She truly believes in giving honor to a visitor." He threw to knife at Jason.— Nalini Singh
"He threw it back as Venom added, "Thought she might have that guest neatly executed as the court sleeps.
The masters of life know the way, for they listen to the voice within them, the voice of wisdom and simplicity, the voice that reasons beyond cleverness and knows beyond knowledge.— Benjamin Hoff
Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else- unless it is an enemy— Albert Einstein
The 'cleverness' syndrome has taken the place of melody. It's like everyone has come down with this terrible disease in jazz ... you are always expected to do your own material, which is a strange thing to do if you're a poor composer but a great player.— Keith Jarrett
When it comes to cleverness, I'm afraid that I was limited to alternate tuesdays ...— William Frederick
In international affairs a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than demonstrations of tactical cleverness.— Henry Kissinger
Kindness is true wisdom - not cleverness.— Debasish Mridha
Not all clever words are true ... And inversely most things that are true are not clever.— Bess Streeter Aldrich
I like ornament at the right time, but I don't want a poem to be made out of decoration ... When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart-in all its forms-is endlessly available there. To experience ourselves in an important way just knocks me out. It puzzles me why people have given that up for cleverness. Some of them are ingenious, more ingenious than I am, but so many of them aren't any good at being alive.— Jack Gilbert
Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest. William Gaddis, The Recognitions.— William Gaddis
Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him.— Sun Tzu
Naps are not a sign of physical slovenliness. They are a sign that I am listening to my body. It will reward me with stable emotions, hormones that stay in check, social finesse, continued cleverness, and the ability to write prose that does not make me gag.— Thomm Quackenbush
He was stupid, yes, in the particular way that very clever people can be stupid.— Terry Pratchett
The ways in which Oscar Wilde was attacking the Romantics that preceded him, and the Romantic ideas that preceded him, were very similar to what the glam-rockers, particularly Bowie and Bryan Ferry, were attacking in the earnestness of '60s culture. Trying to shock, but with wit, cleverness, and homosexuality.— Todd Haynes
They [human beings] are unwilling to gamble that God made those people who are skilled at rational argumentation uniquely virtuous. They protect themselves and others from cleverness by obscuring their preferences.— James G. March
![Cleverness Sayings By James G. March: They [human beings] are unwilling to gamble that God made those people who are skilled](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/cleverness-sayings-by-james-g-march-236239.jpg "Cleverness Sayings By James G. March: They [human beings] are unwilling to gamble that God made those people who are skilled")
The great gift of conversation lies less in displaying it ourselves than in drawing it out of others. He who leaves your company pleased with himself and his own cleverness is perfectly well pleased with you.— Jean De La Bruyere
Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her cleverness— George Eliot
Many of the greatest men have owed their success to industry rather than to cleverness.— John Lubbock
From that day forward she never used my name. Eventually I forgot it. Mrs. H called me something new. She named me cruel and smirking, she named me not for beauty or for cleverness or for sweetness. She named me a thing I could aspire to but never become, the one thing I was not and could never be: Snow White.— Catherynne M Valente
I'd rather rely on mother nature's wisdom than man's cleverness— Wendell Berry
It's a fine thing to be clever, but too much cleverness usually produces the same result as ignorance.-Lady Berwick— Lisa Kleypas
Moved by the need for control, for an unchallenged top tier, the power elite in American history has thrived by placating the vulnerable and creating for them a false sense of identification----denying real class differences whenever possible. The relative few who escape their lower class roots are held up as models, as though everyone at the bottom has the same chance of succeeding through cleverness and hard work, scrimping and saving. Personal connections, favoritism, and trading on class-based knowledge still grease the wheels that power social mobility in today's business and professional worlds.— Nancy Isenberg
From dead plant matter to nematodes to bacteria, never underestimate the cleverness of mushrooms to find new food!— Paul Stamets
Did you measure to attain your height? Did you use geometry to radiate your limb? Did you lament storm-torn branches? Did you inventory your leaves for the sun? You did none of these things, yet man in his cleverness Cannot match your perfection.— Ming-Dao Deng
The Vicar and Miss Marcy had managed to by-pass the suffering that comes to most people - he by his religion, she by her kindness to others. And it came to me that if one does that, one is liable to miss too much along with the suffering - perhaps, in a way, life itself. Is that why Miss Marcy seems so young for her age - why the Vicar, in spite of all his cleverness, has that look of an elderly baby? I said aloud: 'I don't want to miss *anything.*' And then misery came rushing back like a river that has been dammed up. I tried to open my heart to it, to welcome it as a part of my life's experience, and at first that made it easier to bear. Then it got worse than ever before - it was physical as well as mental, my heart and ribs and shoulders and chest, even my arms, ached.— Dodie Smith
You somehow didn't expect cleverness from a girl this beautiful; beautiful girls did not, as a rule, have to be clever. So far as Bert could tell, all beautiful girls had to do was wake up in the morning.— Stephen King
Cultivate truth, good faith, experience, cleverness, sociability, and industry.— Pittacus Of Mytilene
Clever's not enough to hold me - I want characters who are more than devices to be moved about for Effect.— Laura Anne Gilman
It is not strength, but art, obtains the prize, And to be swift is less than to be wise.— Homer
Emotion will always win over coolness and cleverness. It's when a scene works emotionally and it's cool and clever, then it's great. That's what you want.— Quentin Tarantino
we have come to depend on the instant rush of energy and delight we feel when we display our cleverness by making an unkind remark and the spurt of triumph when we vanquish an annoying colleague. Thus do we assert ourselves and tell the world who we are. It is difficult to break a habit upon which we depend for our sense of self.— Karen Armstrong
Fantasy and drama appeal to us. They are socially acceptable and make you feel good about yourself. Moreover, you get rewarded for being cleverly ignorant.— Saurabh Sharma
It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".— Richard Stallman
Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.— Jeff Bezos
It has always been more difficult for a man to keep than to get; for, in the one case, fortune aids, which often assists injustice; but, in the other case, sense is required. Therefore, we often see a person deficient in cleverness rise to wealth; and then, from want of sense, roll head over heels to the bottom.— Giambattista Basile
I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves. [in response to Rousseau's "The Social Contract"]— Voltaire
When did you know?"— Penny Reid
I watched him take a breath, and with it all pretense fell away. All his walls, all his cleverness, all his grandstanding and pretending. He looked vulnerable, and it made my chest ache.
"When I saw you ...
It is the individual voice, present to itself, that needs to be heard. We need to hear the process of the musician working on himself. We don't need to hear who is more clever with synthesizers. Our cleverness has created the world we live in, which in many ways, we're sorry about.— Keith Jarrett
One might conclude that only clever people remain free, but it's not so: foolish men also remain free if they know how to hide their folly. And the clever ones are locked away if they show their cleverness. The others who remain free are those who have the right to be whatever they want. My brother was a nobody, a happy man, not clever enough to be feared and not foolish enough for no one to know what he might do; he was too cowardly to be an outlaw, too naive to be bad, too lazy to be someone's enemy. In a word, he was destined by divine providence to be greeted by people without respect, to be recognized for his value without being asked to show it.— Mesa Selimovic
Books! Cleverness! There are more important things--friendship, bravery.— J.K. Rowling
I'm convinced that the best solutions are often the ones that are counterintuitive - that challenge conventional thinking - and end in breakthroughs. It is always easier to do things the same old way ... why change? To fight this, keep your dissatisfaction index high and break with tradition. Don't be too quick to accept the way things are being done. Question whether there's a better way. Very often you will find that once you make this break from the usual way - and incidentally, this is probably the hardest thing to do - and start on a new track your horizon of new thoughts immediately broadens. New ideas flow in like water. Always keep your interests broad - don't let your mind be stunted by a limited view.— Nathaniel J. Wyeth
Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified.— Virginia Woolf
Do feel free to call upon me. My discretion may be relied upon, I do assure you." He bowed quaintly from his saddle. "To the same extent as your loyalty to Colum MacKenzie?" I said, arching my brows. The small brown eyes met mine full on, and I saw both the cleverness and the humor that lurked in their faded depths. "Ah, weel," he said, without apology. "Worth a try.— Diana Gabaldon
People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.— Terry Pratchett
The height of cleverness is in one's ability to be very clever without seeming clever at all.— Criss Jami
After we have made the comparison between the malicious and destructive "cleverness" of the goblins and the gentle and genteel simplicity of the hobbits, we will perceive that the conflict in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings between those who serve the Shadow and those who walk in the Light, between trolls, goblins, and dragons on the one side, and hobbits, dwarves, and elves on the other, is a battle between two civilizations, the culture of death and the culture of life, which is closer to home than we might at first realize.— Joseph Pearce
Cleverness is not wisdom. And not to think mortal thoughts is to see few days.— Euripides
Cleverness is no guarantee of sensible behaviour.— Joe Abercrombie
The work of God can only be carried on by the power of God. The key is not $, organization, cleverness or education. No matter the society or culture, the city or town, God has never lacked the power to work through available people to glorify his name.— Jim Cymbala
I am firmly of the opinion that women who make a lot of effort to hang onto their looks in middle age (unless they are beauties, entertainers or prostitutes) are rather sad, as one should surely have something more substantial to recommend one by this time, such as kindness or cleverness.— Julie Burchill
Negativity is not intelligent. It is always of the ego. The ego may be clever, but it is not intelligent. Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connected. Cleverness is motivated by self-interest, and it is extremely short-sighted. Most politicians and businesspeople are clever. Very few are intelligent. Whatever is attained through cleverness is short-lived and always turns out to be eventually self-defeating. Cleverness divides; intelligence includes.— Eckhart Tolle
We are all these things [ ... ]. Pride, desire, compassion, cleverness, belligerence, fruitfulness, loyalty ... and guilt. But above it all stands love. And if we desire to be more than human, that is the star by which we must set our sights.— Jacqueline Carey
![Cleverness Sayings By Jacqueline Carey: We are all these things [ ... ]. Pride, desire, compassion, cleverness, belligerence, fruitfulness, loyalty](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/cleverness-sayings-by-jacqueline-carey-413110.jpg "Cleverness Sayings By Jacqueline Carey: We are all these things [ ... ]. Pride, desire, compassion, cleverness, belligerence, fruitfulness, loyalty")
If we fail to appreciate the soul that Easternism gives us, then what we have is a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process that counts on cleverness.— Joel Salatin
People see the cleverness of nature and suppose it's the cleverness of the animal itself but it was obvious to me that each and every segment of the animal isn't aware. How much I'd hate to live totally unaware of myself, I thought. What would be the point of living, of existing, if you weren't ever to know about it? I looked at the Fox Moth and pitied it, poor unconscious creature. But then, I supposed, at least it wouldn't be disappointed. It would never find out.— Poppy Adams
Fight to escape from your own cleverness. If you do, then you will find salvation and uprightness through Jesus Christ our Lord.— John Climacus
28. Anger, lust, these enemies of mine, Are limbless and devoid of faculties. They have no bravery, no cleverness; How then have they reduced me to such slavery?— Santideva
And that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom of Bohemia, and how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman's wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honourable title of the woman.— Arthur Conan Doyle
The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist.— Jacques Barzun
