Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.
Aleister Crowley
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.
Arthur Smith
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.
Bill Kristol
People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.
Brian Reynolds Myers
A blunder at the right moment is better than cleverness at the wrong time.
Carolyn Wells
The queen of crime, Agatha Christie, was always more concerned about the clockwork cleverness of the plot, never the investigator.
Christopher Fowler
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!
Constance Wu
I remember devouring the entire Hardy Boys series over one summer, enthralled by their bravery and cleverness.
Dan Brown
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.
Donna Mills
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.
Elizabeth Banks
Cleverness is not wisdom.
Euripides
The bold are helpless without cleverness.
It is a great act of cleverness to be able to conceal one's being clever.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve.
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.
George Steiner
The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.
Henri Frederic Amiel
Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.
Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.
Hermann Hesse
A man likes his wife to be just clever enough to appreciate his cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it.
Israel Zangwill
The great gift of conversation lies less in displaying it ourselves than in drawing it out of others. He who leaves your company pleased with himself and his own cleverness is perfectly well pleased with you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the... cleverness that we have to make changes.
The thing is, comedy's gone in a weird direction. People are really into ironic comedy and fakeness and cleverness.
Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
From dead plant matter to nematodes to bacteria, never underestimate the cleverness of mushrooms to find new food!
Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.
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.
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
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.
In the life of our organism, we are continually dealing with a development of force followed by a state of equilibrium. Of course, the human being has no conscious knowledge of what is really going on within him, but what takes place is so infinitely wise that the cleverness of the human ego is nothing by comparison.
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of 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 hate clever-cleverness, but I love good honest cleverness.
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.
