Quotes About Cleverness

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

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day.

Beware of epigram! It is one of Satan's favourite disguises.

Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest." William Gaddis, The Recognitions.

You stand for nothing. You respect nobody. The music you dance to is devoid of beauty, its lyrics empty of humor or cleverness.

I enjoy my pettiness with a dose of wit.

Two ways of thinking: Human kingdom and human cleverness or God's kingdom and God's cleverness

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

Cleverness is a burden after that. You are supposed to settle down and be a good person, raise your children, and be good to your friends, which you may not have been back when you were clever.

Be good, sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can.

It is sometimes a point of as much cleverness to know to make good use of advice from others as to be able give good advice to oneself.

"How did you - " "Fool your guards? They're not very good. They forgot to check the ceiling for spiders." Valek grinned. His angular face softened.

The antidote to frustration is a calm faith, not in your own cleverness, or in hard toil, but in God's guidance.

Wit is educated insolence.

Wit and humor do not reside in slow minds.

You stand for nothing. You respect nobody. The music you dance to is devoid of beauty, its lyrics empty of humor or cleverness.

You have a ready wit. Tell me when it's ready.

Humor wades across a brook, wit jumps over it.

Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence.

It's not how hard you play and train that matter it's how smart."  

Only now, when it is too late, do I long for Dearth. I was a misbegotten child of bad blood and bile, and I mistook my own orneriness for cleverness. I presumed to know what happiness was - something I could possess, like a marble, or a man. Something I could only find elsewhere. But just when I started to find it at home, I outfoxed myself and lost it forever.

Cleverness pursues its own little aims. Intelligence sees the larger whole in which all things are connected. Cleverness is motivated by self-interest, and it is extremely short-sighted. Most politicians and businesspeople are clever. Very few are intelligent. Whatever is attained through cleverness is short-lived and always turns out to be eventually self-defeating. Cleverness divides; intelligence includes.

and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.