Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

J. K. Rowling

Voldemort is playing a very clever game. Declaring himself might have provoked open rebellion. Remaining masked has created confusion, uncertainty, and fear.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

W. H. Auden

Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.

Trenton Lee Stewart

Oh, here's a clever one. Do you remember this question from the first test?It reads, 'What wrong with this statement?' And do you know what Constance wrote in reply? She wrote, 'What's wrong with you?

I now fully understand that it was a clever ruse by the Iraqi government to enact an elaborate scheme of deception.

Jose Maria Aznar

Appeasement was never a very clever policy, and it should not be our option today.

Kenneth Prewitt

The actual assertion that the Census Bureau could behave in such a way as to tilt things one way or the other way in the partisan sense, is, on the face of it, a silly charge. It's the same Census Bureau that's considered to be incompetent by some people, and then some of the same people are saying that this incompetent agency is so clever and so Machiavellian that it can design a census for partisan reasons.

Jonathan Safran Foer

There's nothing good about being certain about things. And I don't think there's any real talent in using language in a manipulative way, with phrases like "tax relief" or "Social Security reform." It's politically clever, but it's also completely disingenuous, and it's not something to aspire to.

Jojo Moyes

Somewhere in this world is a man who loves you, who understands how precious and clever and kind you are. A man who has always loved you and, to his detriment, suspects he always will.

Matt Groening

Everybody is clever, just in their own ways

Ken Wilber

Is this a topic whose time has truly come? The integration of science and religion? Or have I just written a clever book that temporarily impressed a few people and will otherwise go as quickly as it came?

Julian Barnes

If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.

Kim Harrison

There were no more choices, no more options, no more clever ways out of a tough situation. And the rush, I realized in a brutal wash of despair, is a false god I’ve chased my entire life. One that cost me everything in the blind search for sensation. My entire existence amounted to nothing.

Mark Twain

A good lawyer knows the law; a clever one takes the judge to lunch.

Marian Keyes

I don't like this idea of division: that if you're a clever woman then you've got to be a particular way. Because men don't. Men please themselves.

Mikhail Bulgakov

He's clever,' thought Ivan,' I must admit there are some smart people even among the intelligentsia

Patrice Leconte

If a film is very clever and well-written, that's what gives you freedom as a director.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

To be rude is as good as being clever.

Mary Doria Russell

If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Les Dawson

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