Cunning Quotes - Page 6

Or perhaps in Slytherin, you'll make your real friends. Those cunning folk use any means to achieve their ends.

J. K. Rowling

Real, Mean, Use

J. K. Rowling, “Sorting Hat's Song (Book 1)”

4 Copy quote

Show source
Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.

Herman Melville

Thinking, May, Madness

Herman Melville (2008). “Moby-Dick”, p.204, Velvet Element Books

4 Copy quote

Show source
A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path, for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.

Rudyard Kipling

Elephants, Voice, Light

Rudyard Kipling (2016). “Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated Edition): 5 Novels & 350+ Short Stories, Poetry, Historical Military Works and Autobiographical Writings from one of the most popular writers in England, known for The Jungle Book, Kim, The Man Who Would Be King”, p.1920, e-artnow (Open Publishing)

10 Copy quote

Show source
Till swollen with cunning, of a self-conceit, His waxen wings did mount above his reach, And, melting, Heavens conspir'd his overthrow.

Christopher Marlowe

Self, Wings, Heaven

Christopher Marlowe (2005). “The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus”, p.49, Routledge

19 Copy quote

Show source
But where do you live mostly now?" With the lost boys." Who are they?" They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expanses. I'm captain." What fun it must be!" Yes," said cunning Peter, "but we are rather lonely. You see we have no female companionship." Are none of the others girls?" Oh no; girls, you know, are much too clever to fall out of their prams.

James M. Barrie

Girl, Lonely, Children

5 Copy quote
Then she told me why a tiger is gold and black. It has two ways. The gold side leaps with its fierce heart. The black side stands still with cunning, hiding its gold between the trees, seeing and not being seen, waiting patiently for things to come. I did not learn to use my black side until after the bad man left me.

Amy Tan

Heart, Men, Two

10 Copy quote
One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.

J. M. Coetzee

Night, Cities, Pyramids

J. M. Coetzee (1980). “Waiting for the Barbarians”, Penguin Group USA

12 Copy quote

Show source
...but you are too much for them: the weak in courage are strong in cunning; and one by one, you have absorbed and have captured and dishonored, and have distilled of your deliverers the most ruinous of all poisons; people hear Beethoven in concert halls, or over a bridge game, or to relax; Cézannes are hung on walls, reproduced, in natural wood frames; van Gogh is the man who cut off his ear and whose yellows became recently popular in window decoration.

James Agee

Strong, Wall, Cutting

4 Copy quote
All the cunning of the devil is exercised in trying to tear us away from the word.

Martin Luther

Tears, Trying, Devil

Martin Luther (1959). “What Luther says: an anthology”, Concordia

29 Copy quote

Show source
For Rousseau and Mandeville the absence of a moral instinct meant the laws of society had no moral validity, they were nothing but the inventions of the cunning and the powerful, in order to maintain or to acquire an unnatural and unjust superiority over the rest of their fellow creatures.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

Powerful, Order, Law

6 Copy quote
Greediness consists in ravishing the goods of another through violence or cunning, as in the two noble professions of the conqueror and courtier. But the merchant, like all other industrious men, seeks his benefit only in his talent, in virtue of freely arrived at agreements, and appealing to faith and the laws.

Augustin Thierry

Philosophy, Men, Law

8 Copy quote
It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf.

Thomas Paine

War, Justice, Violence

Thomas Paine (2016). “THOMAS PAINE Ultimate Collection: Political Works, Philosophical Writings, Speeches, Letters & Biography (Including Common Sense, The Rights of Man & The Age of Reason): The American Crisis, The Constitution of 1795, Declaration of Rights, Agrarian Justice, The Republican Proclamation, Anti-Monarchal Essay, Letters to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington…”, p.43, e-artnow

8 Copy quote

Show source
Increasingly I felt as if I were entering a struggle that might even be more than life and death. It might be a struggle for my soul, my essence, or whatever part of me might have reference to the eternal. There are worse things than death, I suspected... so far the word demon had never been spoken among the scientists and doctors who were working with me...Alone at night I worried about the legendary cunning of demons ...At the very least I was going stark, raving mad.

Whitley Strieber

Struggle, Night, Essence

13 Copy quote
Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

Thomas Carlyle

Sunshine, Greatness, Men

"Selections from Carlyle".

4 Copy quote

Show source
But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.

Kurt Vonnegut

Spiritual, Sorry, Book

4 Copy quote
All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you; digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed.

Richard Adams

People, Enemy, Warning

"Watership Down". www.imdb.com. 1978.

34 Copy quote

Show source
At that moment, in the sunset on Watership Down, there was offered to General Woundwort the opportunity to show whether he was really the leader of vision and genius which he believed himself to be, or whether he was no more than a tyrant with the courage and cunning of a pirate. For one beat of his pulse the lame rabbit's idea shone clearly before him. He grasped it and realized what it meant. The next, he had pushed it away from him.

Richard Adams

Sunset, Opportunity, Tyrants

Richard Adams (2009). “Watership Down: A Novel”, p.421, Simon and Schuster

7 Copy quote

Show source
I will teach you to love death. I will empty you of grief and guilt and self-pity and fill you up with hate and cunning and the spirit of vengeance. I will make my final stand here, Benjamin Thomas Parish.

Rick Yancey

Hate, Grief, Self

Rick Yancey (2013). “The 5th Wave”, p.128, Penguin

4 Copy quote

Show source
Those words, temperate and moderate, are words either of political cowardice, or of cunning, or seduction. A thing, moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper, is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice.

Thomas Paine

Pain, Political, Vices

Thomas Paine (1998). “Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings”, p.383, OUP Oxford

10 Copy quote

Show source
It occurred to Dr. Lecter in the moment that with all his knowledge and intrusion, he could never entirely predict her, or own her at all. He could feed the caterpillar, he could whisper through the chrysalis; what hatched out followed its own nature and was beyond him. He wondered if she had the .45 on her leg beneath the gown. Clarice Starling smiled at him then, the cabochons caught the firelight and the monster was lost in self-congratulation at his own exquisite taste and cunning.

Thomas Harris

Congratulations, Self, Monsters

21 Copy quote
The need always to lie and always to avoid the truth stripped everyone of what Custine called 'the two greatest gifts of God-the soul and the speech which communicates it.' People became hypocritical, cunning, mistrustful, cynical, silent, cruel, and indifferent to the fate of others as a result of the destruction of their own souls.

Theodore Dalrymple

Lying, Fate, Two

12 Copy quote
...a common observation, that few are mended by imprisonment, and that he, whose crimes have made confinement necessary, seldom makes any other use of his enlargement, than to do, with greater cunning, what he did before with less.

Samuel Johnson

Jail, Use, Enlargement

Samuel Johnson, John Hawkins (1787). “The Works: Together With His Life, And Notes On His Life Of The Poets”, p.6

4 Copy quote

Show source
As a farmer, man himself became closely attached to the landscape, firmly rooted to the soil that supported him. At times the soil seemed bountiful and kindly and again stubborn and unfriendly, but it was always a challenge to man's cunning.

Charles Kellogg

Men, Challenges, Stubborn

4 Copy quote
May the merciful god, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore.

H. P. Lovecraft

Sleep, Men, Night

H. P. Lovecraft (2011). “H. P. Lovecraft Fiction Collection”, p.319, Boris Lariushin

5 Copy quote

Show source
A game of secret, cunning stratagems, in which only the fools who are fated to lose reveal their true aims or motives - even to themselves.

Eugene O'Neill

Love, Games, Secret

Eugene O'Neill (1988). “More Stately Mansions”, p.160, Oxford University Press on Demand

20 Copy quote

Show source

You May Also Like Quotes On:

Clever

Catchy