Cleverness Quotes

The desire to seem clever often keeps us from being so.

Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.

Wit is often a mask. If you tear it you will find either genius irritated or cleverness juggling.

The thing is, comedy's gone in a weird direction. People are really into ironic comedy and fakeness and cleverness.

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.

Cleverness, after all, has its limitations. Its mechanical judgments and clever remarks tend to prove inaccurate with passing time, because it doesn't look very deeply into things to begin with.

Cleverness is not wisdom. And not to think mortal thoughts is to see few days.

The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve.

When cleverness emerges There is great hypocrisy.

Remarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism.

Thus, though I have heard of successful military operations that were clumsy but swift, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.

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

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.

The best substitute for money is ingenuity.

I'd rather rely on mother nature's wisdom than man's cleverness

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.

The cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.

We can be more clever than one, but not more clever than all.

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.

Cleverness is a burden after that. You are supposed to settle down and be a good person, raise your children, and be good to your friends, which you may not have been back when you were clever.

Cleverness is cheap. It is faith that He praises.

Many of the greatest men have owed their success to industry rather than to cleverness.

cleverness is a disease.

Which would you rather be if you had the choice--divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good?

The height of cleverness is in one's ability to be very clever without seeming clever at all.

Some things are so silly they have a certain brilliance to them. Other things, set as standards for brilliance and therefore exalted by many who don't know why, become tarnished because of it.

They tried to be too clever---and that was their undoing.

I've never been a big fan of improvisation, because I think you appreciate the process and the cleverness of it more than the actual comedy in most cases.

People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.

cleverness that comes too late is hardly cleverness at all?

Cleverness isn't always true nor is the truth always clever

I remember devouring the entire Hardy Boys series over one summer, enthralled by their bravery and cleverness.

Too great cleverness is but deceptive delicacy, true delicacy is the most substantial cleverness.

Perhaps the most embarrassing experience is being caught at a lie by a simpleton who sneers at our asinine cleverness.

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.

I'm accused of cleverness as if it were a sin. She is merely clever, they say.

That's one of the things about comedy - I think it works best when it's contextualized, as opposed to kind of an island of cleverness.

We judge matters so superficially that ordinary acts and words, done and spoken with some flair and some knowledge of worldly matters, often succeed better than the greatest cleverness.

Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.

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.

I think the cleverness is inadvertent.

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.

On Update, the only real original thing was trying to take away the cleverness of the punchline and make it as blunt as possible.

Do not put cleverness in front of the communication.

Cleverness becomes a public nuisance.

Trade your cleverness for bewilderment.

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

If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleve

Intelligence is more important than strength, that is why earth is ruled by men and not by animals.

No matter how tiny you look, you can lead huge men if you have what the huge men don't have.