Cleverness Quotes

1. "Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else- unless it is an enemy"
Author: Albert Einstein

2. "The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve-endings and his cleverness won't allow it."
Author: Aldous Huxley

3. "Ew." Kyle made a face only a ten-year-old who'd had his cootie shot could make. "Get a room!" He spun and disappeared through the door, clearly not getting the cleverness of his own joke, seeing as we were at a bed-and-breakfast."
Author: Alicia Thompson

4. "You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers -- you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance."
Author: Anaïs Nin

5. "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."
Author: Anuj Somany

6. "(a) Going to Oxford didn't necessarily make a person clever.(b) Cleverness didn't necessarily make a good prime minister.(c) If a person couldn't even run a pickle factory profitably, how was that person going to run a whole country?And, most important of all:(d) All Indian mothers are obsessed with their sons and are therefore poor judges of their abilities."
Author: Arundhati Roy

7. "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."
Author: Benjamin Hoff

8. "A blunder at the right moment is better than cleverness at the wrong time."
Author: Carolyn Wells

9. "Cleverness that comes too late is hardly cleverness at all?"
Author: Cassandra Clare

10. "...The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way.Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in; machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.Our knowledge has made us cynical,our cleverness hard and unkind.We think too much and feel too little.More than machinery we need humanity,more than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness.Without these qualities life will be violent and all will be lost."
Author: Charles Chaplin

11. "This skin, this hair, all this outside stuff. It isn't me. It's just my package. It's like the wrapper around the sweet; it isn't the sweet itself. What we really are is all inside the package. All our feelings. All our good moods and bad moods. All our ideas, our cleverness, our love, that's what a person really is. It's called a spirit."
Author: Colin Cotterill

12. "Cleverness isn't always true nor is the truth always clever."
Author: Criss Jami

13. "And if you are already flying upside down and don't know it, your cleverness will do you little good."
Author: Dallas Willard

14. "You stand for nothing. You respect nobody. The music you dance to is devoid of beauty, its lyrics empty of humor or cleverness."
Author: David Klass

15. "It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass."
Author: Douglas Adams

16. "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."
Author: Emily Rodda

17. "And now Rosalind enters. Rosalind is-- utterly Rosalind. She is one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them. Two types of men seldom do: dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty. All others are hers by natural prerogative."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

18. "The tension of the soul in unhappiness, which cultivates its strength; its horror at the sight of the great destruction; its inventiveness and bravery in bearing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting unhappiness, and whatever in the way of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cleverness, greatness the heart has been granted - has it not been granted them through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?"
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

19. "Merlin's eyes narrowed. "We require heroes of wit and cleverness, unafraid to foil convention in order to defend a higher allegiance. Battle skills matter not. What we need at this moment, James Potter, are scoundrels with honor."
Author: G. Norman Lippert

20. "The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity."
Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe

21. "Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness."
Author: Henri Frederic Amiel

22. "Half smiling, with imperturbable brightness and friendliness, the Buddha looked steadily at the stranger and dismissed him with a hardly visible gesture. 'You are clever, O Samana,' said the Illustrious One, 'you know how to speak cleverly, my friend. Be on your guard against too much cleverness."
Author: Hermann Hesse

23. "I have brought peace to this land, and security," he began."And what of your soul, when you use the cleverness of argument to cloak such acts? Do you think that the peace of a thousand cancels out the unjust death of one single person? It may be desirable, it may win you praise from those who have happily survived you and prospered from your deeds, but you have committed ignoble acts, and have been too proud to own them. I have waited patiently here, hoping that you would come to me, for if you understood, then some of your acts would be mitigated. But instead you send me this manuscript, proud, magisterial, and demonstrating only that you have understood nothing at all.""I returned to public life on your advice, madam," he said stiffly."Yes; I advised it. I said if learning must die it should do so with a friend by its bedside. Not an assassin."
Author: Iain Pears

24. "Harry - you're a great wizard, you know." "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!"
Author: J.K. Rowling

25. "Oh, the cleverness of me!"
Author: J.M. Barrie

26. "The fairies, as their custom, clapped their hands with delight over their cleverness, and they were so madly in love with the little house that they could not bear to think they had finished it."
Author: J.M. Barrie

27. "Peter: Oh, the cleverness of me. Wendy: Of course, I did nothing... Peter: You did a little. Wendy: Oh, the cleverness of you."
Author: J.M. Barrie

28. "Only now, when it is too late, do I long for Dearth. I was a misbegotten child of bad blood and bile, and I mistook my own orneriness for cleverness. I presumed to know what happiness was - something I could possess, like a marble, or a man. Something I could only find elsewhere. But just when I started to find it at home, I outfoxed myself and lost it forever."
Author: Jane Avrich

29. "The true spirit of conversation consists more in bringing out the cleverness of others than in showing a great deal of it yourself; he who goes away pleased with himself and his own wit is also greatly pleased with you. Most men would rather please than admire you; they seek less to be instructed, and even to be amused, than to be praised and applauded."
Author: Jean De La Bruyère

30. "Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids."
Author: John Steinbeck

31. "In older science fiction stories, they had to rely on storytelling as opposed to spectacle. The old run of the 'Twilight Zone,' the star was the writing and the storytelling, and the characters and the twists and the cleverness in the setup and payoff and execution."
Author: Josh Trank

32. "Always come down from the barren heights of cleverness into the green valleys of folly."
Author: Ludwig Wittgenstein

33. "Also, if a man takes pride in his disguise skills, it would be a foolish wife who would claim to recognise him: it's always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness."
Author: Margaret Atwood

34. "Now you tell me, when a father goes ahead and washes diapers or performs some other mean task for his child, and someone ridicules him as an effeminate fool, though that father is acting in the spirit just described and in Christian faith, my dear fellow you tell me, which of the two is most keenly ridiculing the other? God, with all his angels and creatures, is smiling, not because that father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith. Those who sneer at him and see only the task but not the faith are ridiculing God with all his creatures, as the biggest fool on earth. Indeed, they are only ridiculing themselves; with all their cleverness they are nothing but devil's fools."
Author: Martin Luther

35. "Size and strength are not the answer to everything. Cleverness can overcome strength nearly every time. A small clever man can almost always best a strong, dim one."
Author: Mercedes Lackey

36. "Already, the brain consumed more than a quarter of the body's blood supply... an organ accounting for only a small percentage of body mass. If brains grew larger, and better, then perhaps they would consume more - perhaps so much that, like an infection, they would overrun their hosts and kill the bodies that transported them. Or perhaps, in their infinite cleverness, they would find a way to destroy themselves and each other. There were times when, as he [Stone] sat at State Department or Defense Department meetings, and looked around the table, he would see nothing more than a dozen gray, convoluted brains sitting on the table... Just brains, sitting around, trying to decide how to outwit other brains, at other conference tables.Idiotic."
Author: Michael Crichton

37. "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."
Author: Nawal El Saadawi

38. "JACK.I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.ALGERNON.We have.JACK.I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about?ALGERNON.The fools? Oh! about the clever people, of course.JACK.What fools!"
Author: Oscar Wilde

39. "I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays."
Author: Oscar Wilde

40. "An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence."
Author: Raymond Chandler

41. "I, for one, thought this would be something good for Settlers to know from the get-go. With so much risk, why did SA feel the consequences of exposure were something to be concealed until there was not choice but to drag people like Monica and me into their secret beige meeting room and scare us half to death after we'd screwed up? It made about as much sense as extremely conservative parents not telling their daughters about the consequences of sex until after they were already pregnant. Shutting the barn door after the horse was loose, much?But then, I was beginning to think SA wasn't nearly as smart as they believed themselves to be. Our remaining undiscovered for so long seemed due more to humanity's tendency not to see things they didn't want to see, rather than cleverness on the part of Settler's Affairs."
Author: Stacey Jay

42. "Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays."
Author: Sun Tzu

43. "Cleverness is like rouge - liberal application makes a woman look common and desperate. Wit is knowing how to apply it."
Author: Tessa Dare

44. "In that day every trial borne in patience will be pleasing and the voice of iniquity will be stilled; the devout will be glad; the irreligious will mourn; and the mortified body will rejoice far more than if it had been pampered with every pleasure. Then the cheap garment will shine with splendor and the rich one become faded and worn; the poor cottage will be more praised than the gilded palace. In that day persevering patience will count more than all the power in this world; simple obedience will be exalted above all worldly cleverness; a good and clean conscience will gladden the heart of man far more than the philosophy of the learned; and contempt for riches will be of more weight than every treasure on earth."
Author: Thomas à Kempis

45. "Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness."
Author: Thomas Huxley

46. "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."
Author: Tom Brown Jr.

47. "Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt."
Author: Virginia Woolf

48. "Now that cleverness was the fashion most people were clever – even perfect fools; and cleverness after all was often only a bore: all head and no body."
Author: Walter De La Mare

49. "The first and last weakness of his life, before him again. For a moment he felt himself blinded by his own memories; his own remembrances of the wits and wiles of Marian Halcombe that would steal into his thoughts; the sound of her laughter at his outrageous tales, the shadowed glance of distrust, the way her eyebrows would raise ever so slightly despite her resolution to seem disinterested in his foreign insights. She was the first woman he ventured to have complete equality in matching his tremendous cleverness."
Author: Wilkie Collins

50. "When it comes to cleverness, I'm afraid that I was limited to alternate tuesdays..."
Author: William Frederick

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