Top 100 Quotes About Cleverness
#1. Well, to be fair, he's in a situation where intelligence does rather go out the window," Cross said. "I have a theory that women actually siphon off our cleverness during the courting phase, and keep it for themselves. Which is why they always seem to see the endgame before we do.
Sarah MacLean
#2. 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.
Margaret Atwood
#3. Your praying and your preaching should be of the same length. You don't want to find yourself limping, with one leg shorter than the other. God works as a result of prayer and faithfulness, not technique and cleverness. But
N. T. Wright
#4. The bold are helpless without cleverness.
Euripides
#5. Books! Cleverness! There are more important things--friendship, bravery.
J.K. Rowling
#6. I hate clever-cleverness, but I love good honest cleverness.
Tobias Hill
#7. Cleverness isn't always true nor is the truth always clever.
Criss Jami
#8. A net set up to catch fish may snare a duck; a mantis hunting an insect may itself be set upon by a sparrow. Machinations are hidden within machinations; changes arise beyond changes. So how can wit and cleverness be relied upon?
Zicheng Hong
#9. All the human talent, cleverness, and church-growth methods in the world can never compare with the invisible but very real blessing of God. The
Jim Cymbala
#10. I am often surprised by the cleverness, and now and again by the stupidity, of my dog; and I have similar experiences with mankind.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#11. ...while cleverness is appropriate to rhetoric, and inventiveness to poetry, truth alone is appropriate to history.
Procopius Of Caesarea
#12. Your toddler will be "good" if he feels like doing what you happen to want him to do and does not happen to feel like doing anything you would dislike. With a little cleverness you can organize life as a whole, and issues in particular, so that you both want the same thing most of the time.
Penelope Leach
#13. Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.
John Steinbeck
#14. Our society promotes cleverness instead of wisdom, and celebrates the most superficial, harsh, and least useful aspects of our intelligence.
Sogyal Rinpoche
#15. 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
#16. I think wisdom is over-rated. Wisdom is just cleverness, with all the guts kicked out of it. I'd rather be clever than wise, any day. Most of the wise people I know give me a headache, but I never met a clever man or woman I didn't like.
Gregory David Roberts
#17. 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.
J.M. Barrie
#18. When the great Tao is forgotten, goodness and piety appear. When the body's intelligence declines, cleverness and knowledge step forth. When there is no peace in the family, filial piety begins. When the country falls into chaos, patriotism is born.
Laozi
#19. A blunder at the right moment is better than cleverness at the wrong time.
Carolyn Wells
#20. Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise ... not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.
William Bernbach
#21. The powers which enable evil to carry on are powers given it by goodness. All the things which enable a bad man to be effectively bad are in themselves good things - resolution, cleverness, good looks, existence itself.
C.S. Lewis
#22. The queen of crime, Agatha Christie, was always more concerned about the clockwork cleverness of the plot, never the investigator.
Christopher Fowler
#23. Abandon cleverness, discard profit, and thieves and robbers will disappear.
Laozi
#24. Simplicity, not cleverness, can be the source of happiness.
Debasish Mridha
#25. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness.
Charlie Chaplin
#26. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying
what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must simply say what one felt.
Virginia Woolf
#27. She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.
Joe Hill
#28. When you know you're going to die, there's no comfort in cleverness. Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end.
Gregory David Roberts
#29. You have more brain cells than there are grains of sand on your favorite beach, and you have cleverness, dexterity, and creativity - all of which powerfully combine when you are at risk - if you listen to your intuition
Gavin De Becker
#30. 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
#31. Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of thinking and making.
David Foster Wallace
#32. 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
#34. There is a precise cleverness which itself is unjust; And there is one who is offensive that justice may be revealed.
Anonymous
#35. We were young, thoughtless - carried away with our own cleverness
J.K. Rowling
#36. Love is the ark appointed for the righteous,
Which annuls the danger and provides a way of escape.
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition.
Rumi
#37. You cannot replace kindness by cleverness.
Kamon
#38. 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
#39. When cleverness emerges There is great hypocrisy.
Laozi
#41. Stud males might be emotional, temperamental, and developmentally stunted, at the mercy of their androgens, but that didn't make them incapable of generosity, friendship, cleverness, or creativity.
Elizabeth Bear
#42. Your normal Wall Street big-swinging Richard has enough of a lingering moral compass to at least tell himself that his wizardry benefits somebody or something besides himself. You know, his cleverness makes capital markets more efficient. It provides credit to productive enterprise. Whatever.
Tina Brown
#43. What I want are words that reflect my heart, not my cleverness.
Hugh Prather
#44. You don't need a dead father to explain a character's sadness. And impressing yourself with wit/cleverness often feels like what it is - authorial intrusion.
Mary J. Miller
#45. The key is not money; organization, cleverness, or education. Are you and I seeing the results Peter saw? Are we bringing thousands of men and women to Christ the way he did? If not, we need to get back to His power source ...
Jim Cymbala
#47. I've heard that sarcasm is no substitute for cleverness
Meredith Duran
#48. 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
#49. When it comes to cleverness, I'm afraid that I was limited to alternate tuesdays ...
William Frederick
#50. Two ways of thinking: Human kingdom and human cleverness or God's kingdom and God's cleverness
Dallas Willard
#51. A liar is a man who does now know how to deceive, a flatterer one who only deceives fools: he who knows how to make skilful use of the truth, and understands its eloquence, can alone pride himself in cleverness.
Luc De Clapiers
#52. Me? Books and cleverness? There are more important things in life. Friendship, and bravery, and Harry, just be careful.
Hermoine Granger
#53. 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.
Josh Trank
#55. The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#57. In science, modesty and genius do not coexist well together. (In Washington, modesty and cleverness don't.) Einstein is perhaps the most famous exception to the rule.
Charles Krauthammer
#58. But there are times in the history of humanity when cleverness might as well be simplicity.
Anonymous
#59. 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
#60. There is no sphere of human thought in which it is easier to show superficial cleverness and the appearance of superior wisdom than in discussing questions of currency and exchange
Winston Churchill
#61. I remember devouring the entire Hardy Boys series over one summer, enthralled by their bravery and cleverness.
Dan Brown
#62. You - you insufferable - " "I give you credit for cleverness - " " - scurrilous, despicable - " " - but it is time you returned to where you belong." " - pompous, controlling ass." Unwisely, he smirked. "Now, now, my dear. Language.
Elisa Braden
#63. But Finn was like no one else. He could be funny, teasing, informative all at once. I was discovering that smart, engaged dialogue with a man is extremely erotic. Cleverness is an aphrodisiac.
Jane Lotter
#64. 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
#65. 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.
Mercedes Lackey
#66. All human behaviour, language, thoughts, feelings, actions, and consciousness emerge from this massively interconnected network of neurons. Each neuron is pretty dumb; it either fires in a certain situation or it doesn't, but out of this mass dumbness comes great cleverness.
Trevor Harley
#67. There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
Thomas Mann
#68. Rumi observed, "Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment.
Wayne W. Dyer
#69. An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
Raymond Chandler
#70. You must find your own way. Unless you find it yourself, it will not be your own way and will take you nowhere. Earnestly live your truth as you have found it, act on the little you have understood. It is earnestness that will take you through, not cleverness
Roy Melvyn
#71. When did you know?"
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 ...
Penny Reid
#72. People always knock what's new but I love the modern Internet, where cleverness is currency. Social media is a cleverness meritocracy. We're living in it.
Alexei Maxim Russell
#73. The system itself has the mark of cleverness and ingenuity ... When you manipulate the menu system, you feel as though you are at the helm of the future ... The Xbox probably has the most raw potential for excellent games
Jerry Holkins
#74. The arithmetic is quite simple. Instead of playing Draw Something, fucking draw something! Take the cleverness you apply to Words with Friends and utilize it to make some kick-ass corn bread. Corn Bread with Friends - try that game.
Nick Offerman
#75. 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.
Douglas Adams
#76. Country people tend to consider that they have a corner on righteousness and to distrust most manifestations of cleverness, while people in the city are leery of righteousness but ascribe to themselves all manner of cleverness.
Edward Hoagland
#77. Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.
Hermann Hesse
#78. You dive deeper, you strip away the cleverness and the words become more important than your ego and that's when you know it's real, when it's good.
Kamal Ravikant
#79. 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!
J.K. Rowling
#80. From dead plant matter to nematodes to bacteria, never underestimate the cleverness of mushrooms to find new food!
Paul Stamets
#81. Thomas Edison was not, Paul thought, the first man to become rich by inventing something clever. Rather, he was the first man to build a factory for harnessing cleverness.
Graham Moore
#82. I'd rather rely on mother nature's wisdom than man's cleverness
Wendell Berry
#83. It must be plain also that we should not anxiously strive for riches and honors by relying on our own diligence or cleverness or by depending on the favor of men or by trusting in the notion of good luck, but that we should always expect the Lord to direct us to the lot he has provided for us.
John Calvin
#84. It is sometimes a point of as much cleverness to know to make good use of advice from others as to be able give good advice to oneself.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#85. He knows that in leadership cleverness is not as important as content, that charisma and dash are not as vital as character and doctrine.
Neal A. Maxwell
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. People never will recollect that mere learning and mere cleverness are of next to no value in life, while energy and intellectual grip, the things that are inborn and cannot be taught, are everything.
Thomas Huxley
#89. Always come down from the barren heights of cleverness into the green valleys of folly.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#90. To cook, and to do it well, every talent must be used; the strength of a prize-fighter, the imagination of a poet, the brain of an empire builder, the patience of Job, the eye and the touch of an artist, and, to turn your mistakes into edible assets, the cleverness of a politician.
Anne Ellis
#91. 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.
Hermann Hesse
#92. The disease having been caused by allowing cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure.
E.F. Schumacher
#93. A man likes his wife to be just clever enough to appreciate his cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it.
Israel Zangwill
#94. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.
Jeff Bezos
#95. Limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the ... cleverness that we have to make changes.
Leon Kass
#96. 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
#98. 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.
G. Norman Lippert
#99. Do you really not know that to praise a woman's mind is to abuse her? Is everyone not convinced that where there's cleverness there's no heart? Has it not been decided that a clever woman is a sort of monster who can feel nothing? Ask anyone, they'll all tell you so.
Karolina Pavlova
#100. We in Ireland are gifted beyond most peoples with a talent for acting, and in Dublin especially, while scorning culture, which indeed we have not got, we are possessed of a most futile and diverting cleverness.
Susan Mitchell
