Famous Quotes & Sayings

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

We are not fond of praising, and never praise any one except from interested motives. Praise is a clever, concealed, and delicate flattery, which gratifies in different ways the giver and the receiver. The one takes it as a recompense of his merit, and the other bestows it to display his equity and discernment.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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

Ian Mcewan

And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.

Hugh Laurie

To be a head boy, you have to be very clever, you have to be a scholar, and I was never a scholar in any shape or form.

Hugh Laurie

They, all of them, work incredibly hard to make me seem clever and heroic, neither of which I am.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style.... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.

Eva Longoria

That's typical Gabrielle, ... Marc has a very clever plan for this pregnancy. It's going to turn her world upside down

Henry Moore

Clever people can copy the handwriting of an artist - it's like forging a person's signature.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.

Christopher Hitchens

As is so often the case with pieces that appear in the Onion, I honestly could not decide whether this was a clever hoax or not - the arguments were almost exactly as stupid as the real thing.

Chris Shipley

System uptime, data protection, and identity theft are weighty issues. It takes real ingenuity to out-think the fraudsters who are trying to steal identities and hack into enterprise systems. The 12 smart companies that debuted security solutions today at DEMO have designed serious, and seriously clever, innovations.

George Eliot

It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent - like a carrier pigeon.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.

George Seaton

I wish I were one of those terribly clever people who, when they write their autobiographies, always say, when I was fifteen months old I distinctly remember my Aunt Fanny saying to me, etc.

George R. R. Martin

Why should death make a man truthful, or even clever? The dead are likely dull fellows, full of tedious complaints - the ground's too cold, my gravestone should be larger, why does he get more worms than I do...

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sometimes all you need to do to win clever people over to a principle is to present it in the form of a shocking paradox.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Clever people are never credited with their follies: what a deprivation of human rights!

Franz Beckenbauer

Messi is a genius. He has everything. When I watch him, I see a player who is very, very, skilful, very clever and his left foot is like Diego Maradona's.

Jeff Lindsay

I am not shy about admitting my modest talents. For example, I am happy to admit that I am better than average at clever remarks, and I also have a flair for getting people to like me. But to be perfectly fair to myself, I am ever-ready to confess my shortcomings, too, and a quick round of soul-searching forced me to admit that I had never been any good at all at breathing water. As I hung there from the seat belt, dazed and watching the water pour in and swirl around my head, this began to seem like a very large character flaw.

Jeanette Winterson

In this life you have to be your own hero. By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way. Like it or not, you are alone in a forest, just like all those fairy tales that begin with a hero who’s usually stupid but somehow brave, or who might be clever, but weak as a straw, and away he goes (don’t worry about the gender), cheered on by nobody, via the castles and the bears, and the old witch and the enchanted stream, and by and by (we hope) he’ll find the treasure.

Jennifer Stone

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

Jeff Bezos

It's harder to be kind than clever

Jeff Bezos

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

George S. Patton

Pressure makes diamonds

Jennifer Ellison

I was born and brought up in Liverpool with my clever little sister Jemma, who is 14 and wants to be a vet. My mum Jane is an administrator and my dad Peter is a taxi driver.

Jean Vanier

We can be seduced...by powerful political groups that promise more wealth and lower taxes. Those with power can use clever, psychological tricks and play upon our weaknesses and brokenness in order to attract us to their way of thinking. We can be manipulated into illusion.

Goodman Ace

TV—a clever contraction, derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. We call it a medium, because nothing's well done.

Gregory David Roberts

There's a truth deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn't always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabhakar told it to me, just as I'm telling it to you now.

Ignatius of Antioch

Christianity is not a matter of persuading people of particular ideas, but of inviting them to share in the greatness of Christ. So pray that I may never fall into the trap of impressing people with clever speech, but instead I may learn to speak with humility, desiring only to impress people with Christ himself.

Ian Bogost

Play isn't you being clever, or finding a trick, or finding a way of covering over your own misery, or persuading someone to do what you want. It's the process of working with the materials that you find and discovering what's possible with them.

Ian Anderson

I don't think successful musicians were really put on this planet in order to have a great time, pat themselves on the back and say, 'Oh, what a clever boy I am!' I think that, like most artists, we were put on the planet to suffer just a little. And we do.