Ingenious Quotes - Page 2

• No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Heart, Mind, Matter

  17 Copy quote

• The most ingenious men are now agreed, that [universities] are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry.

  George Berkeley

  Men, Prejudice, Corruption

  21 Copy quote

• No solution [to the problem of poverty] is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Income, Poverty, Problem

  48 Copy quote

• Things grew and lived in constant adversity, ingenious in solving problems of existence.

  Mary Astor

  Adversity, Problem, Grew

  Mary Astor (1968). “A Place Called Saturday”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The physical body is an agent of the spirit and its mirror. It is an engine and a reflection of the spirit. It is the spirit's ingenious memorandum to itself and the spirit sees itself in my body, just as I see my own face in a looking glass. My nerves reflect this. The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.

  Saul Bellow

  Dark, Reflection, Glasses

  Saul Bellow (2008). “Humboldt's Gift”, Penguin Classics

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The idea that one might derive satisfaction from his or her successful work, because that work is ingenious, beautiful, or just pleasing, has become ridiculed.

  Niklaus Wirth

  Beautiful, Work, Successful

  8 Copy quote

• ['John F. Kennedy] movie is based on a massive best-selling book, which is always helpful. And then the script was amazing and answered my question, "Why this? Why now?" And the "why now" is that it's 50 years since the assassination, and the country needs to have and will have a conversation about that. And the "why this" is the construct, which I think is sort of ingenious.

  Rob Lowe

  Country, Book, Thinking

  Source: www.avclub.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Without the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences... humans are trapped in a cognitive prison. They are like intelligent fish born in a deep shallowed pool. Wondering and restless, longing to reach out, they think about the world outside. They invent ingenious speculations and myths about the origin of the confining waters, of the sun and the sky and the stars above , and the meaning of their own existence. But they are wrong, always wrong because the world is too remote from ordinary experience to be merely imagined.

  E. O. Wilson

  Stars, Intelligent, Thinking

  12 Copy quote

• To be humane, we must ever be ready to pronounce that wise, ingenious and modest statement 'I do not know'.

  Galileo Galilei

  Wise, Modest, Ready

  333 Copy quote

• Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.

  Joseph Conrad

  Mother, Suggestions, Invention

  Joseph Conrad “The Secret Sharer and Other Stories”, W. W. Norton & Company

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself - not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.

  Edward Abbey

  Animal, Men, Vanity

  "The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West". Book by Edward Abbey ("Shadows from the Big Woods", p. 225), 1977.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• What sort of attractions do you think lured our coreligionists out of the ghetto and into the mainstream of European culture? Was it the wit of Molière, or the ingenious stage mechanisms of Pixérécourt? Or was it simply the opportunity to cast an eye, without shame, upon the living, unclad human form?

  Ben Katchor

  Ghetto, Eye, Opportunity

  4 Copy quote

• An ingenious mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Mind, Criticism, Praise

  9 Copy quote

• Life is very persistent and very ingenious in seizing every opportunity.

  Joseph Wood Krutch

  Life, Opportunity, Persistent

  Joseph Wood Krutch, Paul Landacre (2005). “The Great Chain of Life”, p.2, University of Iowa Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• A Garden, an Elaboratory, a Work - house, Improvements and Breeding, are pleasant and Profitable Diversions to the Idle and Ingenious: For here they miss Ill Company, and converse with Nature and Art; whose Variety are equally grateful and instructing; and preserve a good Constitution of Body and Mind.

  William Penn

  Art, Work, Grateful

  William Penn (1782). “The Select Works of William Penn....”, p.127

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Power, Simple, Men

  Edgar Allan Poe (2006). “The Best of Poe”, p.29, Prestwick House Inc

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• One problem with our current society is that we have an attitude towards education as if it is there to simply make you more clever, make you more ingenious... Even though our society does not emphasize this, the most important use of knowledge and education is to help us understand the importance of engaging in more wholesome actions and bringing about discipline within our minds. The proper utilization of our intelligence and knowledge is to effect changes from within to develop a good heart.

  Dalai Lama

  Inspirational, Attitude, Clever

  7 Copy quote

• love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Passion, Men, Europe

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2013). “The Selected Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche”, p.666, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief.

  Upton Sinclair

  Jesus, Believe, School

  8 Copy quote

• Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Art, Cold, Exactitude

  5 Copy quote

• A declaration of the independence of America, and the sovereignty of the United STates was drawn by the ingenious and philosophic pen of Thomas Jefferson, Esquire, a delegate from the state of Virginia

  Mercy Otis Warren

  Virginia, America, Independence

  8 Copy quote

• After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, "I refute it thus."

  James Boswell

  Philosophy, Science, Feet

  James Boswell (1998). “Life of Johnson”, p.333, Oxford University Press, USA

  53 Copy quote

  Show source

• A piratical ghost story in thirteen ingenious but potentially disturbing rhyming couplets, originally conceived as a confection both to amuse and to entertain by Mr. Neil Gaiman, scrivener, and then doodled, elaborated upon, illustrated, and beaten soundly by Mr. Cris Grimly, etcher and illuminator, featuring two brave children, their diminutive but no less courageous gazelle, and a large number of extremely dangerous trolls, monsters, bugbears, creatures, and other such nastiness, many of which have perfectly disgusting eating habits and ought not, under any circumstances, to be encouraged.

  Neil Gaiman

  Children, Two, Numbers

  9 Copy quote

• Mr. Obama has an ingenious approach to job losses: He describes them as job gains.

  Karl Rove

  Jobs, Loss, Usa

  9 Copy quote

• And I know that the younger generation is doing things that are so ingenious. And for them it's not a matter of a political belief or an environmental stance. It's really just common sense.

  Daryl Hannah

  Young Generation, Common Sense, Political

  "Hollywood star takes eco-activism to Web". Interview with Vanessa McGrady, www.nbcnews.com. Jun 1, 2006.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source