Most Cleverest Quotes & Sayings

He mistook, as the cleverest men often do mistake, in underrating the cruelty of women. — Ouida

Marriage is a fierce battle before which the two partners ask heaven for its blessing, because loving each other is the most audacious of enterprises; the battle is not slow to start, and victory, that is to say freedom, goes to the cleverest. — Honore De Balzac

The cleverest is the one who thinks that he too can well be wrong in any matter whatsoever! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

There was no idiocy bigger than that committed by a man who believed himself the cleverest creature under the sun. — Sherry Thomas

By Gryffindor, the bravest were Prized far beyond the rest; For Ravenclaw, the cleverest Would always be the best; For Hufflepuff, hard workers were Most worthy of admission; And power-hungry Slytherin Loved those of great ambition. — J.K. Rowling

Some of history's cleverest business minds understood the power of share platforms, from the aggressive titans who made fortunes building the nation's railroads, to Conrad Hilton, who created the first premier brand of international hotels. — Lisa Gansky

One of the cleverest and most insidious twists in the whole sorry tale is the way women are double bound by a gender-biased definition of professionalism and the threat of being labeled "whining. — Laura Bates

I usually say I write for the smartest, cleverest, wittiest audience I know, and that's me. — Harlan Ellison

The great principle of Western society is that competition rules here as it rules in everything else. The best man - that is to say, the strongest and cleverest - is likely to get the best woman, in the sense of the most beautiful person. — Lafcadio Hearn

Calculating machines do sums better than even the cleverest people ... As arithmetic has grown easier, it has come to be less respected. — Bertrand Russell

Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

One novel has been all my reading, Our Mutual Friend, one of the cleverest that Dickens has written. — Lewis Carroll

Our species may yet end its strange eventful history as just the last, the cleverest of the great apes. The great ape that was clever - but not clever enough. It could escape from most things but not from its own mental confusion. — H.G.Wells

If I ever felt inclined to be timid as I was going into a room hill of people, I would say to myself, You're the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation in the world-why should you be frightened? — Beatrice Webb

This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I'm still around, but from here on in, for reasons I'm not at liberty to disclose, I've disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me. — J.D. Salinger

Have you noticed that the cleverest people at school are often not the ones who succeed in life? — Paul Arden

I know a wise Buddhist monk who, in a speech to his fellow countrymen, once said he'd love to know why someone who boasts that he is the cleverest, the strongest, the bravest or the most gifted man on earth is thought ridiculous and embarrassing, whereas if, instead of 'I', he says, 'we are the most intelligent, the strongest, the bravest and the most gifted people on earth', his fellow countrymen applaud enthusiastically and call him a patriot. For there is nothing patriotic about it. One can be attached to one's own country without needing to insist that the rest of the world's inhabitants are worthless. But as more and more people were taken in by this sort of nonsense, the menace to peace grew greater. — E.H. Gombrich

He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can't make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals. — Walter Kirn

The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest - weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. 'Fitness,' then, is only another name for 'survival.' Darwinism: That survivors survive. — Charles Fort

It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle. — Martin Amis

Watch 'Dog with a Blog' to get a good laugh, to see me, of course, and to see an awesome, awesome talking dog who is the cleverest, most awesome dude in the world. He's really, really adorable and cute, and it's really cool seeing what kind of tricks he has up his sleeve. — Blake Michael

I am not. I am certain of the things that matter. Kindness and honor are always good. Do not build God in your own image, with your doubts and fears, your need to judge and condemn, your need for safety, and to be right whatever the cost to others, and ultimately to yourself. Let your soul be still, and know that God is never capricious, never cruel and never wrong. It is our understanding that stumbles. Even the cleverest of us are yet children, and the wisest of us know that. — Anne Perry

Never tell an unnecessary lie; the truth has great authority. The cleverest murders have been caught, not because they told the one essential lie, but because they continued to lie about unimportant detail when the truth could have done them no harm. — P.D. James

To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Emma is spoiled by being the cleverest of her family. At ten years old, she had the misfortune of being able to answer questions which puzzled her sister at seventeen. — Jane Austen

It's with such nothings that clever people are thrown off most easily. The cleverer the man, the less he suspects that he can be thrown off with the simplest thing. It's precisely the simplest thing that will throw off the cleverest man. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not. — Edith Wharton

He wanted to be loved for being just what he was. In this community of Yskalnari there was harmony, but no love.
He no longer wanted to be the greatest, strongest or cleverest. He had left all that far behind. He longed to be loved just as he was, good or bad, handsome or ugly, clever or stupid, with all his faults - or possibly because of them.
But what was he actually?
He no longer knew. So much have been given to him in Fantastica, and now, among all these gifts and powers, he could no longer find himself. — Michael Ende

The work of teaching and organizing the others fell naturally upon the pigs, who were generally recognized as being the cleverest of the animals. — George Orwell

There is no ending, no neatness ... where water is concerned. It is wild, febrile, kind, ambiguous; it is dark and carries the mud, and it is clear and the cleanest thing. Too much of it kills us, and not enough kills us, and it is what makes us, mostly. Water is the cleverest substance, wily beyond the stretch of our mortal imaginations. And no matter where it is pent, no matter if it is air or liquid or solid, it will someday, inevitably, find its way out. — Lauren Groff

The cleverest woman on earth is the biggest fool on earth with a man. — Dorothy Parker

But it seems an irony of creation that man's mind knows how to handle things the better the farther removed they are from the center of his existence. Thus we are cleverest where knowledge matters least ... — Hermann Weyl

But one thing I beg of you, look on me as your friend; and if you want some help, advice, or simply want to open your heart to someone- not now, but when things are clearer in your heart- think of me.' He took her hand and kissed it. 'I shall be happy, if I am able ... ' Pierre was confused.
'Don't speak to me like that; I'm not worth it!' cried Natasha ...
'Hush, hush your whole life lies before you,' he said to her.
'Before me! No! All is over for me,' she said, with shame and humiliation.
'All over?' he repeated. 'If I were not myself, but the handsomest, cleverest, best man in the world, and if I were free I would be on my knees this minute to beg for your hand and your love. — Leo Tolstoy

Growing up in the Boroughs, I thought I must be the cleverest boy in the world, an illusion that I was able to maintain until I got to the grammar school. — Alan Moore

Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised. — Leo Tolstoy

The greatness of a popular character is less according to the ratio of his genius than the sympathy he shows with the prejudices and even the absurdities of his time. Fanatics do not select the cleverest but the most fanatical leaders as was evidenced in the choice of Robespierre by the French Jacobins, and in that of Cromwell by the English Puritans. — Alphonse De Lamartine

Who understands war: the solders? the homeless ones? Mussolini? Or the leaders of the English and the Americans? No, nobody understands war, they only think they do. Maybe the earth that drinks up the blood understands it and says: How foolish is man. Of all the animals that lives upon me, he is the cleverest and the most foolish. — Erik Christian Haugaard

You have the skill. What is more, you were born a woman, And women, though most helpless in doing good deeds, Are of every evil the cleverest of contrivers. — Euripides

The most interesting acquaintanceship I have struck up here is that of Colonel Lapinski. He is without doubt the cleverest Pole
besides being an homme d'action [man of action]
that I have ever met. His sympathies are all on the German side, though in manners and speech he is also a Frenchman. He cares nothing for the struggle of nationalities and only knows the racial struggle. He hates all Orientals, among whom he numbers Russians Turks, Greeks, Armenians, etc., with equal impartiality ... His aim now is to raise a German legion in London ... — Karl Marx

Passion often makes a fool of the cleverest man and often makes the most foolish men clever — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

But what a superb game the three of us are playing. Who is the demon? Who is the liar? Who the human being? Who the cleverest? Who the strongest? Who loves the most? Are we three immense egos fighting for domination or for love, or are these things mixed? — Anais Nin

All agreed that Quickset was the cleverest cat in the world. And, since Quickset had the same opinion, it was surely true. — Lloyd Alexander

The farmer doesn't care for the pitchers' battle that resolves itself into a checkers game. The farmer loves the dramatic, and slugging is more dramatic than even the cleverest pitching. — Home Run Baker

Love's empire is this globe and all mankind; the most refined and the most degraded, the cleverest and the most stupid, are all liable to become his faithful subjects. He can alike command the devotion of an archbishop and a South-Sea Islander, of the most immaculate maiden lady (whatever her age) and of the savage Zulu girl. From the pole to the equator, and from the equator to the further pole, there is no monarch like Love. — H. Rider Haggard

How easy it is for me to live with you, Lord!
How easy it is for me to believe in You!

When my mind is distraught
and my reason fails,
when the cleverest people do not see further
than this evening and do not know
what must be done tomorrow -
You grant me the clear confidence,
that You exist, and that You will take care
that not all the ways of goodness are stopped.

At the height of earthly fame I gaze
with wonder at that path
through hopelessness -
to this point, from which even I have been able to convey
to men some reflection of the light which comes from You.

And you will enable me to go on doing
as much as needs to be done.
And in so far as I do not manage it -
that means that You have allotted the task to others. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Changes in human conditions are brought about by the pioneering of the cleverest and most energetic men. They take the lead and the rest of mankind follows them little by little. — Ludwig Von Mises

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question
such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?
not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had. — C.P. Snow

Some Hindus have an elephant to show.
No one here has ever seen an elephant.
They bring it at night to a dark room.
One by one, we go in the dark and come out
saying how we experience the animal.
One of us happens to touch the trunk.
A water-pipe kind of creature.
Another, the ear. A strong, always moving
back and forth, fan-animal. Another, the leg.
I find it still, like a column on a temple.
Another touches the curve back.
A leathery throne. Another, the cleverest,
feels the tusk. A rounded sword made of porcelain.
He is proud of his description.
Each of us touches one place
and understands the whole in that way.
The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark
are how the senses explore the reality of the elephant.
If each of us held a candle there,
and if we went in together, we could see it. — Rumi

When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself. — Michael Ondaatje

For our purpose, however, what the soldiers did or did not read is irrelevant. For, if soldiers did not learn to fight their battles from reading books, neither is it likely that military historians learned to write their books from watching battles. Battles are extremely confusing; and confronted with the need to make sense of something he does not understand, even the cleverest, indeed preeminently the cleverest man, realizing his need for a language and metaphor he does not possess, will turn to look at what someone else has already made of a similar set of events as a guide for his own pen. — John Keegan

Puns are little plays on words that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water. — Dave Barry

He who challenges the God in his dying bed is indisputably the most courageous man, but not the cleverest one! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

If it was difficult for a visitor to find anything to eat impromptu in Moscow, Havana, Tirana, Bucharest, or Pyongyang, it took little effort to understand the connection of this difficulty with the vulgar anti-commercialism of Saint Karl and Saint Vladimir. Indeed, it would have taken all the ingenuity of the cleverest academics not to have understood it. — Theodore Dalrymple

Caring means cultivating the skills of an active listener. That is easier said than done, as an anecdote about the extraordinary social skills of British politicianBenjamin Disraeli and his rival William Gladstone illustrates ... The rivalry between the two statesmen piqued the curiosity of American Jennie Jerome, admired beauty and the mother of Winston Churchill. Ms. Jerome arranged to dine with Gladstone and then with Disraeli, on consecutive evenings. Afterward, she described the difference between the two men this way: "When I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman. — Marian Deegan

Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The cleverest of all the devils is Opportunity. — Christoph Martin Wieland

My dad grew up in a mud hut and studied by candlelight. He was 14 when he got a scholarship to Russia. He was super clever - the cleverest person. He landed in 5ft of snow, and was alone at 14, studying science and engineering. He didn't have a bed, and he slept on a table. — M.I.A.

We find or invent the cleverest means of attributing our sins to anything or anyone outside of ourselves. — Paul Washer

Things rarely happen for a single reason. Even the cleverest and most skilled manipulators recognize that their real art lies in making use of that which they cannot predict. — Tom Clancy

And your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don't give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers
perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life. — Rainer Maria Rilke

'Once Upon A Time In America' is one of the cleverest films of all time, because you can get out of it whatever you want to get out of it. — Ray Winstone

Audie was the cleverest man Moss had ever met. He was Yoda. He was Gandalf. He was Morpheus. Now he'd become a walking suicide note. — Michael Robotham

Have you noticed how the cleverest people at school are not those who make it in life?
People who are conventionally clever get jobs on their qualifications (the past), not on their desire to succeed (the future).
Very simply, they get overtaken by those who continually strive to be better than they are. — Paul Arden

Are we the only members of the Galaxy that can actually understand what a galaxy is? Could Homo sapiens really be the pinnacle of Creation - the cleverest critters in the cosmos? If we learn the answer is 'no,' that would affect our philosophies forever. — Seth Shostak

Whoever possesses abundant joy must be a good man: but he is probably not the cleverest man, although he achieves exactly what it is that the cleverest man strives with all his cleverness to achieve. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Every king sleeps, but not every king wakes up as king! The snakes of the intrigue crawl around during the night! The cleverest king is the least sleeping king! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Ghislaine didn't look up from the book she was poring over. There was a stack of them on the desk before her, and another beside the narrow bed. Where the eldest and cleverest of her Thirteen had gotten them from, who she'd likely gutted to steal them, Manon didn't care. "Hello, and come right in, why don't you" was the response. Manon leaned against the door and crossed her arms. Only with books, only when reading, was Ghislaine so snappish. On the battlefield, in the air, the dark-skinned witch was quiet, easy to command. A solid soldier, made more valuable by her razor-sharp intelligence, which had earned her the spot among the Thirteen. — Sarah J. Maas

The cleverest character in comedy is the clown, for he who would make people take him for a fool, must not be one. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid. — Doris Lessing

Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain-tricks of custom: but of all of these, perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be miraculous. — Thomas Carlyle