Top 100 The Clever Quotes
#1. There is no such thing as too much swearing. Swearing is just a piece of linguistic mechanics. The words in-between are the clever ones.
Peter Capaldi
#2. She felt like a chess player who, by the clever handling of his pieces, sees the game taking the course intended. Her eyes were bright and tender with a smile as they glanced up into his; and her lips looked hungry for the kiss which they invited.
Kate Chopin
#3. By the time the clever reaches the clouds, the genius is already on the stars.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#4. Today's religion will be the future's mythology. Both believed at one time by many; but proved wrong by the clever.
Steven Crocker
#5. The right thoughts of the clever man are a ladder which takes you higher places. By climbing these ladders, one day you yourself become such a ladder itself!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#6. I am not Cugel the Clever for nothing!
Jack Vance
#7. Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
Gore Vidal
#8. People often get the wrong impression of Mick. The clever businessman is just one side of Mick. The other side is the same as the rest of us, a true rocker!
Ron Wood
#9. We are deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Jonathan Hardy. The clever wit and joy he brought to his performance of Rygel was a true gift to the world of Farscape. My sincerest condolences go out to Jonathan's family and to his many fans around the world.
Brian Henson
#10. The aboriginal peoples of Australia illustrate the conflict between technology and the natural world succinctly, by asking, 'What will you do when the clever men destroy your water?' That, in truth, is what the world is coming to.
Winona LaDuke
#11. The ladies usually go for the biggest damn fool they can find; that is why the human race stands where it does today: we have bred the clever and lasting Casanovas, all hollow inside, like the chocolate Easter bunnies we foster upon our poor children.
Charles Bukowski
#13. Another thing to strive for: reading your history should move the melancholy to laughter, increase the joy of the cheerful, not irritate the simple, fill the clever with admiration for its invention, not give the serious reason to scorn it, and allow the prudent to praise it.
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#14. I always see my wife as the clever one, as the wise one in the family.
Sayed Kashua
#15. Advisers who think that they are very clever while all around them are a bit thick, and that all the problems of the world would be solved if the thick listened to the clever, are liable to be disappointed.
Geoff Mulgan
#16. Any fool can "obey" an order,' Hamo said, darkly. 'The clever thing is to interpret it.
William Boyd
#17. In any relationship, the woman has control, the clever ones don't let the men know.
Groucho Marx
#18. Stupid men are often capable of things the clever would not dare to contemplate
Terry Pratchett
#19. I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade
W. H. Auden
#20. The clever old conniver continued to cogitate.
James D. Doss
#21. Let us not compare the genius with the clever; ocean with the lake!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#22. Only the clever men can be flexible; others are condemned to remain as rigid!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#23. In the battle of existence, Talent is the punch; Tact is the clever footwork.
Wilson Mizner
#24. The world doesn't come to the clever folks, it comes to the stubborn, obstinate, one-idea-at-a-time people.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
#25. The clever reader who is capable or reading between these lines what does not stand written in them but is nevertheless implied will be able to form some conception.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#26. You have quite the clever tongue on you!"
"I've never actually had someone's tongue on me," Shallan said, turning a page and not looking up, "clever or not. I'd hazard to consider it an unpleasant experience."
"It ain't so bad," Gaz said.
Brandon Sanderson
#27. Aesop fable. "You can play the clever fox all you want - but you'll never get the grapes that way.
Rolf Dobelli
#28. The clever men at Oxford, know all that there is to be knowed. But they none of them know one half as much, as intelligent Mr. Toad.
Kenneth Grahame
#29. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.
Winston S. Churchill
#30. 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
#31. Between a stupid fascist and an intelligent fascist, prefer the intelligent one, because there is always a chance to persuade the clever one about the mistakes of his actions! There is no such a chance for stupid and ignorant fascist!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#32. She had always observed that she got on better with clever women than silly ones like herself; the silly ones could never understand her wisdom; whereas the clever ones - the really clever ones - always understood her silliness.
Henry James
#33. City is a madhouse! Don't stay there too much or you get mad! Go to the nature, to the Temple of the Clever!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#34. Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.
Benjamin Disraeli
#35. 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
#36. MRS ALLONBY I adore them. The clever people never listen, and the stupid people never talk.
HESTER I think the stupid people talk a great deal.
MRS ALLONBY Ah, I never listen!
Oscar Wilde
#37. The great Chinese classics have always said that it's better not to fight; that the clever man achieves his ends without violence; that a battle delayed is better than a battle fought.
John Keegan
#38. Every nation determines its own destiny; the clever the nation, the better the fate!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#39. No government likes the clever and the honourable men, because it is impossible to bridle them; they are independent!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#40. Any kind of organized revolt against the party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing to do was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.
George Orwell
#41. The clever cat eats cheese and breathes down rat holes with baited breath.
W.C. Fields
#42. Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#43. Only the clever hills are not jealous of the high mountains! There is no happiness in the high altitudes.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#44. Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#45. Maybe the clever people are not the ones who think they're clever. Maybe the clever people are the ones who accept that they know nothing.
Rachel Joyce
#46. With all the clever brains in America it would be great to see more investment and focus on this essential research!
Louise Burfitt-Dons
#48. If all the good people were clever And all the clever people were good The world would be nicer than ever We thought that it possibly could. But somehow, 'tis seldom or ner The two hit it off as they should The good are so harsh to the clever The clever so rude to the good!
Elizabeth Wordsworth
#49. In an election, a stupid man can get the votes of the ignorant much easier than a clever man simply because he will naturally get the attraction of the ignorant; the clever is always repulsive for ignorant!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#50. Though the stupid have great capacity to direct the world because they are plentiful, the clever has a much greater capacity to prevent the stupid from halting the progression of humanity because - though they are rare - they are tactical and intelligent!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#51. There's this thing, they have in french: L'espirit d'escalier. The spirit of the stairway. I don't think we have a word for it in English. It means, well, the clever things to say that you only think to yourself when you're on the way out.
Neil Gaiman
#52. The clever are marrying the clever and manically educating their children, making it ever harder for the poor to catch up.
Anonymous
#53. Honestly, I just assume that whatever is going to happen to me is going to happen. There it goes: someone is there, someone isn't there. This girl is here. This food is here. I think the clever people are the ones who do a little as possible.
Kevin Ayers
#54. Am I known as Cugel the Clever for nothing?
Jack Vance
#55. The clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop
Ben Aaronovitch
#56. Some fieldmen, and particularly the clever ones, take a perverse pride in not knowing the whole picture. Their art consists in the deft handling of loose ends, and stops there stubbornly.
John Le Carre
#57. We liked to be known as the clever girls. When we decorated our hands with henna for holidays and weddings, we drew calculus and chemical formulae instead of flowers and butterflies.
Malala Yousafzai
#58. You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization - including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain - without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
Thomas Sowell
#59. The earth is not just for the clever and the strong.
Shusaku Endo
#60. Luckily, the clever pets had managed to escape.
Daisy Meadows
#61. The clever words leaked out of his mind and he spoke without thinking, looking her straight in the eye. Maybe this was what honesty felt like.
Joe Abercrombie
#62. Let's get away from
all the clever humans
who put words in our mouth
let's only say what our hearts desire.
Rumi
#63. 208. "Learn to distinguish what should be done and what not; The clever soul will always select his opportunity." ~
Nagarjuna
#64. Our [American] money system is structurally brittle. It doesn't matter if you put a very clever guy or a stupid guy at the wheel. The clever guy will take a half hour to have an accident, and the stupid guy will take ten minutes.
Bernard Lietaer
#65. Two kinds of people are good at foreseeing danger: those who have learned at their own expense, and the clever people who learn a great deal at the expense of others.
Baltasar Gracian
#66. The desperate resilience,the annoyed flamboyance;his personable passivity and his phobic aggressiveness; all trapped in the clever wrinkles of his fingers, the hard unsociable cast of his knuckles, the safe hopelessness of the pads.
Brandon Shire
#67. The clever combatant looks to the effect of combined energy, and does not require too much from individuals. Hence his ability to pick out the right men and utilize combined energy
Sun Tzu
#68. These people could appreciate me and take me for granted, and these men would fall in love with me and admire me, whereas the clever men I meet would just analyse me and tell me I'm this because of this or that because of that.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#69. The gods. We think we understand, we've invented science, but we haven't a clue. Maybe the clever people are not the ones who think they're clever. Maybe the clever people are the ones who accept they know nothing.
Rachel Joyce
#70. Creativity is not the clever rearranging of the known.
Viola Spolin
#71. Beware the clever man that makes the wrong look right
Lawrence Hill
#72. As a writer, you get to play, you get alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you'd thought of.
Iain Banks
#74. Stories are great, but at the end of the day, you remember that moment and that moment and that moment. 'The Avengers' had all of this great, giant action, but for all of the clever dialogue, it's the moments.
Jeffrey Bell
#75. The clever cannot catch the genius; such an attempt is just an act of trying to catch the shadow of a flying bird!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#76. A sharp-tempered woman, or, for that matter, a man, Is easier to deal with than the clever type Who holds her tongue.
Euripides
#77. The strong live off the weak and the clever live off the strong.
Neil Strauss
#78. The clever, albeit fragile, coalition against terrorism brought together by the U.S. government might be able to advance the transition from classical international law to a cosmopolitan order.
Jurgen Habermas
#79. For all the clever jokes that could be made here involving "mind" and "matter" there is one sure and certain variation you can take with you to the grave: "In the grand scheme of things you don't matter very much, and the laws of physics don't mind at all.
Patrick E. McLean
#80. Thucydides, distrusting the clever oratory in the popular assembly, saw a frustrated populace gullibly following those orators who promised solutions which at first sight were pleasant but eventually disastrous. Both
Ernst Breisach
#81. [Hermes addresses Prometheus :] To you, the clever and crafty, bitter beyond all bitterness, who has sinned against the gods in bestowing honors upon creatures of a day
to you, thief of fire, I speak.
Aeschylus
#82. Time will come and some people will be proud of themselves that they have never believed in any religion! This honour will be belonging to the clever people of the society only! For the others, merely the deep shame will remain!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#83. Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.
Graham Greene
#84. I smiled into the clever eyes. "Find out for me," I said, "whether Oliver
Dick Francis
#85. All great events hang by a single thread. The clever man takes advantage of everything, neglects nothing that may give him some added opportunity; the less clever man, by neglecting one thing, sometimes misses everything.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#86. The stupid person's idea of the clever person. [on Aldous Huxley, in Spectator magazine, 1936]
Elizabeth Bowen
#88. Kings also sleep; but the clever ones, with one eye open, just like dolphins and whales.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#89. The only way to get everything you want in life is to be very clever about what you want.
George Hammond
#90. Why,' said he, 'does not the emperor, who has devised so many clever and efficient modes of improving the art of war, organize a regiment of lawyers, judges and legal practitioners, sending them in the hottest fire the enemy could maintain, and using them to save better men?
Alexandre Dumas
#91. There are things roaming around inside my head as clever as Theseus in the Labyrinth. It's just that nobody ever gave them the necessary piece of string, so they'll never find their way out.
Geraldine McCaughrean
#92. There was Pauline de Rothschild, who I thought was very fabulous, and Millicent Rogers, the Standard Oil heiress, very chic, very clever, very original. I admired both those women very much. And I had a great example with my mother, who was extremely chic.
Iris Apfel
#93. If one were to entrust the organisation of public life to the devil, he could not invent a more clever device.
Simone Weil
#94. With her enchanting songs, her rare beauty, and clever tricks, this wild 'wanderess' ensnared my soul like a gypsy-thief, and led me foolish and blind to where you find me now. The first time I saw her, fires were alight. It was a spicy night in Barcelona. The air was fragrant and free.
Roman Payne
#95. Let us people who are so uncommonly clever and learned have a great tenderness and pity for the poor folks who are not endowed with the prodigious talents which we have.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#96. We are never more clever than in the creation of ways to destroy ourselves.
Marcus Sakey
#97. When, in his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan famously said government is the problem, not the solution, he established the Republican mantra that has not changed in all the years since. It was a clever bit of rhetoric, but it has turned too many Republicans into economic simpletons.
David Horsey
#98. Sports became a favorite subject of reflection and will soon be the only way of thinking
Vasily Klyuchevsky
#99. The point that I think myself to be so terribly clever is the precise point at which I am beginning to think myself to be god-like, which causes me to become God-less.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#100. To succeed in the world, it is much more necessary to possess the penetration to discern who is a fool, than to discover who is a clever man.
Charles Maurice De Talleyrand
