Famous Quotes & Sayings

Leo Tolstoy

People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing-refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.

Leo Tolstoy

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. A handsome woman talks nonsense, you listen and hear not nonsense but cleverness. She says and does horrid things, and you see only charm. And if a handsome woman does not say stupid or horrid things, you at once persuade yourself that she is wonderfully clever and moral.

Peter Kreeft

Intellectuals resist faith longer because they can: where ordinary people are helpless before the light, intellectuals are clever enough to spin webs of darkness around their minds and hide in them. That's why only Ph.D.s believe any of the 100 most absurd ideas in the world such as Absolute Relativism, or the Objective Truth of Subjectivism, of the Meaningfulness of Meaninglessness and the Meaninglessness of Meaning, which is the best definition of Deconstructionism I know.

Peter Norvig

More data beats clever algorithms, but better data beats more data.

Peter Capaldi

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.

Philip Pullman

The moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they realize they're naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism. Literary modernism grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself?...a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller.

Philip Pullman

Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, "Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I'll write Ulysses."

Julian Barnes

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

Joseph Epstein

I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism - of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow.

Joseph Farah

Up until now, I believed the nuclear threat to the U.S. from Iran was limited to the ability of terrorists to penetrate the borders or port security to deliver a device to a major city. ...While that threat should continue to be a grave concern for every American, these tests by Iran demonstrate just how devious the fanatical mullahs in Tehran are. We are facing a clever and unscrupulous adversary in Iran that could bring America to its knees.

Joss Whedon

I don't write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don't have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it's bent doesn't actually register. It's the old you-gotta-paint-like-them-before-you-can-paint-like-you thing.

Joss Whedon

I do remember what I said. The promise. To protect her. If I'd done that ... even if I didn't make it, you wouldn't've had to jump. I want you to know I did save you. Not when it counted, of course. But after that. Every night after that. I'd see it all again, do something different. Faster or more clever, you know? Dozens of times, lots of different ways ...Every night I save you.

Keith Jarrett

It is the individual voice, present to itself, that needs to be heard. We need to hear the process of the musician working on himself. We don't need to hear who is more clever with synthesizers. Our cleverness has created the world we live in, which in many ways, we're sorry about.

Ralph Fiennes

Ridicule is also a weapon against forces of evil. Really clever, intelligent ridicule.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Les Baxter

That was when the Spanish came in and conquered the Aztecs. I thought that was a clever thing.

Les Dawson

With wives, men hide behind the air of bravado, which is basically a defence mechanism, I think. Clever creatures, women. Very clever.

Laura Anne Gilman

Clever's not enough to hold me - I want characters who are more than devices to be moved about for Effect.

Thom Yorke

If I had one wish I'd wish for a million wishes because I am clever.

Lauren Groff

I love Twitter. It's like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you're tired of them.

Lewis Carroll

Every story has a moral you just need to be clever enough to find it - the Dutchess

Karl Pilkington

I think it's clever how Rome have kept a load of old stuff. There's no overheads, yet people are going over there to see it.

Josh Billings

It is a statistical fact that the wicked work harder to reach hell than the righteous do to enter heaven

Karl Kraus

The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are clever as he.

Otto von Bismarck

The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep at night

Paul Di Filippo

Immensely clever and libidinously hilarious.The most astonishing thing about Love in a Dead Language is its ingenious construction. Insofar as any printed volume can lay claim to being a multimedia work, this book earns that distinction.

Patrick Warburton

So, deadpan I think just means not acknowledging for one second that you think that this is funny and clever.

Percy Ross

A clever, imaginative, humorous request can open closed doors and closed minds.

Judith Viorst

Passionate investment leaves us vulnerable to loss. And sometimes, no matter how clever we are, we must lose.

Ellie Goulding

Drake, I'd like to collaborate with. He's a phenomenal lyricist. Probably the best rapper in the world at the moment. I love Kanye but there's something about Drake; he's more straight up, really clever and really poetic and metaphorical - I love that. He's just clever.

Ellie Goulding

I would never create an image for myself; I'm not that clever.

Ellie Goulding

My fans are so funny, they make me laugh so much. I've got some really, really, funny, clever fans.

Elizabeth Goudge

But a hare, now, that is a different thing altogether. A hare is not a pet but a person. Hares are clever and brave and loving, and they have fairy blood in them. It’s a grand thing to have a hare for a friend.