Quotes About Cleverness

Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.

Good wits will jump.

To be witty is not enough. One must possess sufficient wit to avoid having too much of it.

What's that one that people seem to like so much? 'Fleabag.' I watched that and it was that sort of Oxbridge 'Oh, I'm so clever and witty, aren't I?' I don't like that stuff. But then I don't like 'Mrs Brown's Boys' either. I like things that are clever but hide it.

Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.

Also, if a man takes pride in his disguise skills, it would be a foolish wife who would claim to recognise him: it's always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness.

Once in a while, Jimmy would make up a word but he never once got caught out. ... He should have been pleased by his success with these verbal fabrications, but instead he was depressed by it. The memos telling him he'd done a good job meant nothing to him; all they proved was that no one was capable of appreciating how clever he had been. He came to understand why serial killers sent helpful clues to the police.

I didn't let on I knew. It would have been dangerous for him. Also, if a man takes pride in his disguising skills, it would be a foolish wife who would claim to recognise him: it's always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness.

Trouble is, he wasn't clever enough to pretend to be a little less clever.

She was too finely educated and clever to be anything but a fierce rebel and philosophical opponent and I had left her, stupidly, on that account.

Whilst stupidity may indeed be a sin, it is also possible to be too clever. I sometimes fear, John, that you are too clever by half.

He was neither clever nor sensitive, but he was loyal--stubbornly sometimes, and even annoyingly and stupidly so in later life.

I don't write like this in order to show how clever and well read I am--though I am rather clever and well read as a matter of fact.

Many of the greatest men have owed their success to industry rather than to cleverness.

Not that Alexandre Dumas, Fils, excels generally in morals (in his books, I mean), but he is really a promising writer as to cleverness, and when he has learnt a little more art he will take no low rank as a novelist. Robert has just been reading a tale of his called 'Diane de Lys,' and throws it down with— 'You must read that, Ba — it is clever — only outrageous as to the morals.' Just what I should expect from Alexandre Dumas, Fils.

Stud males might be emotional, temperamental, and developmentally stunted, at the mercy of their androgens, but that didn't make them incapable of generosity, friendship, cleverness, or creativity.

Elizabeth glanced at her sister queen and smiled. Clever boy. Aye, and they both loved cleverness. Kit winked at Will over his Queen's diamond-studded shoulder, and Will's knees half melted before he quite forced his gaze back to Elizabeth. Damn honor, he thought. And damn vows.

28. Anger, lust, these enemies of mine, Are limbless and devoid of faculties. They have no bravery, no cleverness; How then have they reduced me to such slavery?

To be clever in argument is not rationality but rationalization.

Los trucos más brillantes han sido siempre los más sencillos. Firmin Richard.

think men make more mistakes by being too clever than by being too good

A woman's no business wi' being so clever; it'll turn to trouble, I doubt.

Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her cleverness

If cleverness has often been a sign of decadence throughout history, the attempt to be too clever by half is an even more reliable marker of cultural decline.