Cleverness Quotes

• Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

  Rumi

  Inspirational, Life, Change

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• Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

  Rumi

  Life, Beautiful, Faith

  Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, Rumi (2015). “Collected Poetical Works of Rumi (Delphi Classics)”, p.473, Delphi Classics

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• A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Wise, Spiritual

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• It is a great act of cleverness to be able to conceal one's being clever.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Clever, Able

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• 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

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• We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

  Charlie Chaplin

  Kindness, Business, Thinking

  "Fictional character: Hynkel (Dictator of Tomania / A Jewish Barber)". "The Great Dictator", www.imdb.com. October 15, 1940.

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• The bold are helpless without cleverness.

  Euripides

  Risk, Helpless

  Euripides (1959). “Euripides: Alcestis. The Medea. The Heracleidae. Hippolytus. The Cyclops. Heracles. Iphigenia in Tauris. Helen. Hecuba. Andromache. The Trojan women”

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• The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Inspirational, Wise, Wisdom

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• The desire to seem clever often keeps us from being so.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Clever, Desire, Seems

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• Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion. Bewilderment brings intuitive knowledge.

  Rumi

  Opinion, Intuitive, Sells

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  We think too much and feel too little.

  Charlie Chaplin

  Kindness, Thinking, Wicked World

  "Fictional character: A Jewish Barber". "The Great Dictator", 1940.

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• Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Clever, Intelligence, Sufficient

  Entry for February 16, 1868, "The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel", Book by Henri-Frédéric Amiel, translated by Mary Augusta Ward, 1882.

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• It is not strength, but art, obtains the prize, And to be swift is less than to be wise.

  Homer

  Wise, Art, Prize

  Homer (1760). “The Iliad of Homer”, p.90

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• Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Clever, Intelligent, Valleys

  "Culture and Value" by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Peter Winch, (p. 76e), 1980.

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• The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Know How, Knows, Principal

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• Cleverness is not wisdom.

  Euripides

  Wisdom, Life And Love, Silly

  Euripides (1999). “Iphigenia among the Taurians, Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, Rhesus”, p.185, Clarendon Press

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• Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Clever, People, Intelligence

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• Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Clever, Silly, Writing

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• Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.

  Aleister Crowley

  Wisdom, Science, Magic

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

  Hermann Hesse

  Inspirational, Children, Writing

  Hermann Hesse, Sherab Chödzin (2002). “Siddhartha: A New Translation”, p.59, Shambhala Publications

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• Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Inspirational, Clever, Men

  Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Swasey McKean, Charles Stearns Wheeler (1838). “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays”, p.278

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• A man likes his wife to be just clever enough to appreciate his cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it.

  Israel Zangwill

  Clever, Stupid, Silly

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• We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow, and courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of them ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit.

  Tom Brown, Jr.

  Nature, Native American, Owl

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• An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

  Raymond Chandler

  Age, Literature, Kind

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.75, Univ of California Press

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• If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Loyalty, Loyal Customers, Pounds

  Elbert Hubbard (2005). “Loyalty in Business: One and Twenty Other Good Things”, p.84, Cosimo, Inc.

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