Clever Man Quotes by Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, Gilbert K. Chesterton, Mehmet Murat Ildan, Madeleine de Souvre, marquise de Sable, Mickey Rooney and many others.
A clever man reaps some benefit from the worst catastrophe, and a fool can turn even good luck to his disadvantage.
A clever man should handle his interests so that each will fall in suitable order of their value.
What clever man has ever needed to commit a crime? Crime is the last resort of political half-wits.
Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?
A clever man can see the world from a cave much better than a stupid man can from the top of a mountain!
He who uses trickery should at least make use of his judgment to learn that he can scarcely hide treacherous conduct for very long among clever men who are determined to find him out, although they may pretend to be deceived in order to disguise their knowledge of his deceitfulness.
Meadowlark Lemon is one very clever man, unique and truly one of a kind.
A clever man without wisdom is like a beautiful flower without fragrance.
A man likes his wife to be just clever enough to appreciate his cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it.
Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.
I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance Huxley
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.
To succeed in the world, it is much more necessary to possess the penetration to discern who is a fool, than to discover who is a clever man.
People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus.
I never heard tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people.
I love hearing details of writers’ craft, as cannibals eat the brains of clever men to get cleverer.
No Jew was ever fool enough to turn Christian unless he was a clever man.
Put a very clever man next to a genius, his brightness will immediately turn to dullness!
There’s a road to hell that is paved with good intentions but it’s a long route. The quicker path is paved with the kind of ignorance that clever men who just don’t want to know are best at.
Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves.
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. They’re my biggest heroes. I love everything about Leonard Cohen: his lyrics and his voice. He seems like a really clever man, and Bob Dylan does as well. He’s just really cool.
In every fall, clever man discovers the secrets of further rising!
A fool is a person who guesses and gets it wrong, a clever man is one who guesses, regardless of time period, and gets it right.
It’s a wicked world, and when a clever man turns his brain to crime it is the worst of all.
A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Credulity is always a ridiculous, often a dangerous failing: it has made of many a clever man, a fool; and of many a good man, a knave.
Clever man is a chicken; it can fly, but a little. Genius, on the other hand, is a migratory bird; it can fly at high altitudes until He disappears on the horizon!
Fools lie, clever men stick to the truth.
A clever man commits no minor blunders.
Though you may have known clever men who were indolent, you never knew a great man who was so; and when I hear a young man spoken of as giving promise of great genius, the first question I ask about him always is, Does he work?
It takes a clever man to turn cynic and a wise man to be clever enough not to.
Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them.
The clever men of Oxford, know all that there is to be knowed but they none of them know one half as much as intelligent Mr. Toad.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
How many stars can you count in the sky? How many mistakes can you count in your life? Stop counting! No clever man ever is stuck in the past!
Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at.
In a stupid society, a clever man can come into the power; but in a clever society no stupid can come into the power!
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
Any fool can make soap. It takes a clever man to sell it.
The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.
No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.
Women say . . . that if men had to have babies there would soon be no babies in the world. . . . I have sometimes wished that some clever man would actually have a baby in some new labor-saving way; then all men could take it up, and one of the oldest taunts in the world would be stilled forever.
The aboriginal peoples of Australia illustrate the conflict between technology and the natural world succinctly, by asking, ‘What will you do when the clever men destroy your water?’ That, in truth, is what the world is coming to.
The worst sort of clever men are those who know better than the Bible.
The great Chinese classics have always said that it’s better not to fight; that the clever man achieves his ends without violence; that a battle delayed is better than a battle fought.
