Top 33 Cleverness Quotes

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

If we fail to appreciate the soul that Easternism gives us, then what we have is a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process that counts on cleverness.

In older science fiction stories, they had to rely on storytelling as opposed to spectacle. The old run of the ‘Twilight Zone,’ the star was the writing and the storytelling, and the characters and the twists and the cleverness in the setup and payoff and execution.

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

The pun exists in a social and political void, caring nothing for the issues of its day, content merely to display itself in its small cleverness.

A blunder at the right moment is better than cleverness at the wrong time.

People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.

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

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

Our job is to sell our clients’ merchandise… not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.

Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.

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

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it is the occasion for our cleverness fills me with baffled bitterness and anger.

If the Great Way perishes there will morality and duty. When cleverness and knowledge arise great lies will flourish. When relatives fall out with one another there will be filial duty and love. When states are in confusion there will be faithful servants.

The great thing about Twitter is, you get a lot back, and I read through a lot, and I want my fans to know that I do read a lot, and it’s why I do respond or retweet clever posts, and I’m constantly amazed by the cleverness of people on Twitter.

I hate clever-cleverness, but I love good honest 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.

For me, writing post-apocalyptic novels isn’t so much about exploding helicopters and fifty-megaton doomsday bombs as it is about the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.

I am firmly of the opinion that women who make a lot of effort to hang onto their looks in middle age (unless they are beauties, entertainers or prostitutes) are rather sad, as one should surely have something more substantial to recommend one by this time, such as kindness or cleverness.

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

That’s the rub about ‘Community’ – for all the high-concept cleverness, it really comes down to vulgar humanism, the dumbest kind of sentimental identification. We watch it because we like these people and we miss them when they don’t show up. They become part of the stories we tell ourselves.

The thing is, comedy’s gone in a weird direction. People are really into ironic comedy and fakeness and cleverness.

Basically, if you could get a good trailer out of the script, Roger had no objection to you making a really good movie. He liked it if you did. He liked the more cleverness and ingenuity you could bring to it. He just wasn’t going to give you any more money.

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Your normal Wall Street big-swinging Richard has enough of a lingering moral compass to at least tell himself that his wizardry benefits somebody or something besides himself. You know, his cleverness makes capital markets more efficient. It provides credit to productive enterprise. Whatever.

I kept bugging them about making it more upscale, because I felt Abby, through her cleverness and business sense, was a character who would move up. And that’s what she did.

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

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.

The more you know about somebody’s back story, the deeper you can delve into that well, and the more your comedic choices resonate full-body instead of just being quick, quippy one-liners that are just like a bunch of people trying to be clever. Because after a while, cleverness is just really obnoxious!

I remember devouring the entire Hardy Boys series over one summer, enthralled by their bravery and cleverness.

Cleverness is not wisdom.

The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.

Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.