Clever famous quotes

Your fingertips across my skin, the palm trees swaying in the wind - images. You sang me Spanish lullabies, the sweetest sadness in your eyes - clever trick. / I cannot go to the ocean, I cannot drive the streets at night, I cannot wake up in the morning without you on my mind, so you're gone and I'm haunted, and I bet you are just - fine. Did I make it that easy to walk right in and out of my life?
-- A Fine Frenzy

#Morning #Clever #Ocean

The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists.
-- A. N. Wilson

#Clever #People #Want

I would love for people to think that I am as quick, clever, smart and heroic as the characters that I write, but those characters are characters.
-- Aaron Sorkin

#Clever #Smart #Writing

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
-- Abraham Joshua Heschel

#Bullying #Clever #Teaching

The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.
-- Abraham Lincoln

#Friendship #Best Friend #Clever

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
-- Abraham Lincoln

#Inspirational #Leadership #Clever

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson

#Success #Clever #Work

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.
-- Adolf Hitler

#Clever #People #Nazism

This land is a monopoly of erroneous ideas.
-- Adriano Celentano

#Clever #Land #Ideas

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

#Clever #Undoing #Cleverness

I'm all alone. There has been no man in my life for several months now and although it would be nice to have a boyfriend, I can't just settle for anybody. The fact is I'm choosy, but mainly about a man's character. He has to be interesting, funny and clever. I don't even mind if he's not very good-looking.
-- Agyness Deyn

#Clever #Nice #Character

Yet, isn't it strange, isn't it weird, how we can KNOW that someone is not behaving in the way we imagine, and at the same time we can be totally convinced that he is! How clever the human mind is, that it can accept two contradictory things as 'facts.' Yes, I know that in this case one 'fact' was untrue. But the human mind can KNOW something is untrue and still accept it as a 'fact,' and act on it as if it were true.
-- Aidan Chambers

#Clever #Two #Mind

In the long run, no matter how good or successful you are or how clever or crafty, your business and its future are in the hands of the people you hire.
-- Akio Morita

#Running #Clever #Successful

There's a lot of different ways that a song would be a challenge to parody. There are a lot of songs that would ostensibly be a good candidate for parody, yet I can't think of a clever enough idea. Some songs are too repetitive for me to be able to fashion a humorous set of lyrics around. Some songs flat-out just don't work creatively for me.
-- Al Yankovic

#Fashion #Song #Clever

I discovered that the most dangerous mask is the one worn by intelligent people because they are clever at their disguise.
-- Ala Bashir

#Clever #Intelligent #People

I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.
-- Albert Einstein

#Happiness #Time #Clever

God is clever, but not dishonest.
-- Albert Einstein

#God #Clever

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
-- Albert Einstein

#Inspirational #Lonely #Clever

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.
-- Albert Schweitzer

#Clever #Fun #Animal

Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend.
-- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

#Life #Clever #Simple

War has become an affair of machines...and soldiers are little more than clever mechanics.
-- Alberto Moravia

#Clever #War #Soldier

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Children #Clever #Stupid

To pronounce something clever and honest is not such a big deal, lots of them have been said and written. For a statement of truth to be effective and for it to make people wiser, it has to be filtered through the soul of a highest quality, the soul of an artist.
-- Alexander Ostrovsky

#Clever #Artist #People

The clever way death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out. Generations never fall with one blow - that would be too sad and too obvious. Death prefers to do it piecemeal. The meadow is attacked from several sides at the same time. One of us goes one day; another some time afterwards; you have to stand back and look around you to take in what's missing, to grasp the vast slaughter of your generation...
-- Alphonse Daudet

#Death #Clever #Fall

The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
-- Ambrose Bierce

#Wisdom #Clever #Lying

It so depends on each script, because you can say... I always thought I wouldn't have wanted to do something that was kind of like as big and commercial as 'The Dark is Rising,' but I really liked the script. I thought it was really clever.
-- Amelia Warner

#Clever #Dark #Rising

You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers -- you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance.
-- Anais Nin

#Clever #Thinking #Ideas

I don't like being called 'macho.' Macho basically means stupid and a real Italian man is not macho, he's smart. That's smart in both senses: elegant and clever.
-- Andrea Bocelli

#Clever #Real #Smart

And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical.
-- Andrew Clements

#Clever #Giving #Mind

The great background question about the Labour governments of the sixties is whether with a stronger leader they could have gripped the country's big problems and dealt with them. How did it happen that a cabinet of such brilliant, such clever and self-confident people achieved so little? In part, it was the effect of the whirling court politics demonstrated by 'In Place of Strife'.
-- Andrew Marr

#Country #Clever #Government

The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.
-- Angela Carter

#Clever #Female #Tricks

We entrepreneurs are loners, vagabonds, troublemakers. Success is simply a matter of finding and surrounding ourselves with those open-minded and clever souls who can take our insanity and put it to good use.
-- Anita Roddick

#Clever #Entrepreneur #Insanity

I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful; people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can't.
-- Anne Enright

#Clever #Writing #Thinking

Beauty is something that is hard to debate. Every man thinks his ideal the best. But the wittiest woman rise to the top of this structure, conventional beauty often taking a back seat to a woman possessed of a clever tongue.
-- Anne Mallory

#Clever #Men #Thinking

It's so easy to persecute an older, overweight, unwise, crude, ignorant woman who may very well be a good person at heart who has achieved a great deal in her life. So easy to vilify her and hate her and try to destroy her life. Woe to anyone today who is not slender, young, clever and politically correct.
-- Anne Rice

#Clever #Hate #Heart

Which would you rather be...divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good?
-- Anne Shirley

#Beautiful #Clever

I've been composing music all my life and if I'd been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.
-- Anthony Hopkins

#Clever #School #College

I was one of five very clever kids, the other kids were cleverer than I was and still are and are very achieving. The girls were always first at everything and I was always 101st!
-- Anthony Minghella

#Girl #Clever #Kids

Seeking to know is too often learning to doubt
-- Antoinette du Ligier de la Garde Deshoulieres

#Clever #Doubt

Try to be original in your play and as clever as possible; but don't be afraid to show yourself foolish; we must have freedom of thinking, and only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.
-- Anton Chekhov

#Clever #Writing #Thinking

I love hearing details of writers' craft, as cannibals eat the brains of clever men to get cleverer.
-- Antonia Fraser

#Clever #Men #Brain

The great help of being in the Army is to understand why are the armies clever in what they describe as emotional intelligence, making soldiers come to terms with the death of comrades by certain rituals.
-- Antony Beevor

#Clever #Army #Emotional

There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
-- Archibald MacLeish

#Inspirational #Happiness #Clever

Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.
-- Aristophanes

#Clever #Wine #Mind

When men drink, then they are rich and successful and win lawsuits and are happy and help their friends. Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.
-- Aristophanes

#Clever #Wine #Successful

There is nothing Clever about not being Happy
-- Arnaud Desjardins

#Clever

Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.
-- Arnold Bennett

#Mom #Mother #Clever

The gap between what one knows and what one thinks one knows may be higher in the ranks of the elite. The result is supposedly-clever government interventions, introduced with excessive confidence, leading to disastrous results.
-- Arnold Kling

#Clever #Thinking #Government

The Web is cool, but the library is magic. Where else can the spirit of generations of writers stir your soul? So many writers talk about libraries setting them on their magical paths, it's almost a groaner. But we know it's true. Wander through the stacks and you can feel the dreams, the unique worlds bubbling within each volume. The magic enters you as if by osmosis. On the Web, you may feel clever, lucky and driven to download--but rarely inspired to dream and to write.
-- Arthur Plotnik

#Dream #Clever #Writing

Is this true or only clever?
-- Augustine Birrell

#Inspirational #Clever

The most effective way to build a brand is not by spending millions in advertising, but by finding a clever way to keep your name in the press.
-- Barbara Corcoran

#Clever #Names #Way

I have learned that particularly clever ideas do not always stand up under close scrutiny.
-- Barbara Mertz

#Clever #Ideas #Scrutiny

Injustice towards others is a threat to everybody
-- Baron de Montesquieu

#Clever #Injustice #Threat

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

#Clever #Doctors #People

Ryan Stout, a straight-arrow-looking kind of guy, shocks the crowd into laughter with his inventive interplay between innocence and a jarringly twisted point of view. He goes from loony to weirdly logical. With him, it’s more than clever writing; his comedy is based on clear and clever thinking.
-- Ben Fong-Torres

#Laughter #Clever #Writing

The songwriting of Hall & Oates is deceptively complex. There are a number of key changes that pass you by as you're listening to the song because they're so seamless and clever.
-- Ben Gibbard

#Song #Clever #Keys

A female friend, amiable, clever, and devoted, is a possession more valuable than parks and palaces; and without such a muse, few men can succeed in life, none be contented.
-- Benjamin Disraeli

#Friends #Clever #Men

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.
-- Benjamin Franklin

#Clever #Motivation #4th Of July

A clever mind is not a heart. Knowledge doesn't really care, wisdom does.
-- Benjamin Hoff

#Clever #Heart #Mind

Rabbit's clever," said Pooh thoughtfully. "Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit's clever." "And he has Brain." "Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain." There was a long silence. "I suppose," said Pooh, "that that's why he never understands anything.
-- Benjamin Hoff

#Clever #Hair #Long

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
-- Benjamin Hoff

#Clever #Looks #Judgment

I didn't like the way I looked, the way I dressed and moved, what I achieved and what I felt I was worth. But there was so much energy in me, such belief that one day I'd be handsome and clever and superior and admired, such anticipation when I met new people and new situations. Is that what makes me sad? The eagerness and belief that filled me then and exacted a pledge from life that life could never fulfill? Sometimes I see the same eagerness and belief in the faces of children and teenagers and the sight brings back the same sadness I feel in remembering myself.
-- Bernhard Schlink

#Children #Clever #Teenager

Careful as they may be, developers of Eiffel libraries will always run into cases in which, after releasing a library class, they suddenly experience what in French is called esprit de l'escalier or wit of the staircase: a great thought which unfortunately is an afterthought, like a clever reply that would have stunned all the other dinner guests - if only you had thought of it before walking down the stairs after the party is over.
-- Bertrand Meyer

#Running #Clever #Party

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them.
-- Bertrand Russell

#Clever #Stupid #Men

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.
-- Bertrand Russell

#Clever #Stupid #Men

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
-- Bertrand Russell

#Clever #Smart #Stupid

not all clever words are true. ... And inversely most things that are true are not clever.
-- Bess Streeter Aldrich

#Clever #Cleverness

In the next few years I'd love to play a female version of Doctor Who. I know exactly how I would play her - she would be crafty in a clever kind of way.
-- Billie Piper

#Clever #Doctors #Years

By the time a man is wise enough to watch his step, he's too old to go anywhere.
-- Billy Crystal

#Wise #Clever #Men

Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.
-- Billy Wilder

#Clever #Obvious #Subtlety

The White House is not being very clever in how it takes on our plan, .. In fact the White House is being sloppy. They are taking everything Bob Dole has ever said we ought to do regarding taxes and adding all of those things up and saying it will cost $800 billion.
-- Bob Dole

#Clever #White #House

Message? What the hell do you think I am, a bloody postman?
-- Brendan Behan

#Clever #Thinking #Messages

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
-- Brian Kernighan

#Clever #Writing

Social media is a giant distraction to the ultimate aim, which is honing your craft as a songwriter. There are people who are exceptional at it, however, and if you can do both things, then that's fantastic, but if you are a writer, the time is better spent on a clever lyric than a clever tweet.
-- Bryan Adams

#Clever #Media #People

As so often happens in philosophy, clever people accept a false general principle on a priori grounds and then devote endless labour and ingenuity to explaining away plain facts which obviously conflict with it.
-- C. D. Broad

#Clever #Philosophy #Philosophical

A clever arrangement of bad eggs will never make a good omelet.
-- C. S. Lewis

#Clever #Eggs #Vision

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
-- C. S. Lewis

#Education #Clever #Live Life

His face had become very red and his mouth and fingers were sticky. He did not look either clever or handsome, whatever the Queen might say.
-- C. S. Lewis

#Queens #Clever #Looks

My dad's a very shrewd, clever guy.
-- C. Thomas Howell

#Clever #Dad #Guy

A lot of the tabloid stories are written so well, they're very clever and very funny. But you have to focus on what's really important and not read them - don't dive into it and don't get caught up in it.
-- Calista Flockhart

#Clever #Focus #Important

A professor can never better distinguish himself in his work than by encouraging a clever pupil, for the true discovers are among them, as comets amongst the stars.
-- Carl Linnaeus

#Education #Stars #Clever

I don't have Romário's technique, [Marc] Overmars' pace or [Patrick] Kluivert's strength. But I work harder than the others. I'm like the student who is not as clever, but revises for his exams and does OK in the end.
-- Carles Puyol

#Clever #Hard Work #Technique

With QE3, we are essentially being bought out with our own money...and unemployment is being used to facilitate this process in a very clever manner. Monetary inflation is currently being offset by labor deflation. The way you avoid collapse is by printing money and stealing assets. The way you avoid inflation is with labor deflation.
-- Catherine Austin Fitts

#Clever #Unemployment #Way

But if you must be clever, then be clever. Be brave. Sleep with fists closed and shoot straight.
-- Catherynne M. Valente

#Clever #Sleep #Brave

Marya Morevna! Don't you know anything? Girls must be very, very careful to care only for ribbons and magazines and wedding rings. They must sweep their hearts clean of anything but kisses and theater and dancing. They must never read Pushkin; they must never say clever things; they must never have sly eyes or wear their hair loose and wander around barefoot, or they will draw his attention!
-- Catherynne M. Valente

#Girl #Clever #Eye

You'll have to ask Bill that, Sookie. And this is the only reason we're going? You're not cleverly using this as an excuse to make out with me?" "I'm not that clever, Eric." "I think you deceive yourself, Sookie," Eric said with a brilliant smile.
-- Charlaine Harris

#Clever #Thinking #Eric

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

#Easter #Clever #Children

I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance Huxley
-- Charles Darwin

#Clever #Men #Huxley

This is very clever. They have created a system to cheat.
-- Charles Davenport

#Cheating #Clever #Cheat

Thus far, both political parties have been remarkably clever and effective in concealing this new reality. In fact, the two parties have formed an innovative kind of cartel—an arrangement I have termed America’s political duopoly. Both parties lie about the fact that they have each sold out to the financial sector and the wealthy. So far both have largely gotten away with the lie, helped in part by the enormous amount of money now spent on deceptive, manipulative political advertising.
-- Charles Ferguson

#Clever #Lying #Party

While writing 'Cold Mountain,' I held maps of two geographies, two worlds, in my mind as I wrote. One was an early map of North Carolina. Overlaying it, though, was an imagined map of the landscape Jack travels in the southern Appalachian folktales. He's much the same Jack who climbs the beanstalk, vulnerable and clever and opportunistic.
-- Charles Frazier

#Clever #Writing #Two

The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.
-- Charles Kettering

#Change #Moving On #Clever

What clever man has ever needed to commit a crime? Crime is the last resort of political half-wits.
-- Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

#Clever #Men #Political

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

#Clever #Men #Political

A clever woman often compromises her husband; a stupid woman only compromises herself.
-- Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

#Clever #Husband #Women

My gran always said I was half clever, half stupid, and half crazy.
-- Charlie Higson

#Clever #Crazy #Stupid

The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.
-- Chinua Achebe

#Brother #Clever #Fall

Elvis Costello's song writing is so peerless and individualistic. It's storytelling and it's deeply intelligent and clever.
-- Chip Esten

#Song #Clever #Writing

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.
-- Chris Shipley

#Clever #Real #Smart

A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth
-- Christopher Wren

#Clever #Future #Eye