Famous Quotes & Sayings

Salvador Dali

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

Salma Hayek

I'm suspicious of people who talk about their feelings to the whole world

W. S. Gilbert

Though I'm anything but clever, I could talk like that forever.

W. H. Auden

Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.

Tove Jansson

I mean, anyone can let Danger out but the really clever thing is finding somewhere for it to go afterwards.

Ty Burrell

A lot of modern comedies are difficult to watch too, because they're so ironic and so detached and so quote-unquote clever. They kind of keep you at arm's length. They can be really funny, but they're not really nourishing.

William Golding

Experimental novels are sometimes terribly clever and very seldom read. But the story that appeals to the child sitting on your knee is the one that satisfies the curiosity we all have about what happened then, and then, and then. This is the final restriction put on the technique of telling a story. A basic thing called story is built into the human condition. It's what we are; it's something to which we react.

Discreetly keep most of your radical opinions to yourself. When with people be a listener a large part of the time. Be considerate in every word and act, and resist the tendency to say clever things. The best evidence of your culture is the tone and temper of your conversation.

Herbert Beerbohm Tree

A charming fellow, and so clever: he models himself on me.

Jennifer Ellison

I was born and brought up in Liverpool with my clever little sister Jemma, who is 14 and wants to be a vet. My mum Jane is an administrator and my dad Peter is a taxi driver.

Jean Vanier

We can be seduced...by powerful political groups that promise more wealth and lower taxes. Those with power can use clever, psychological tricks and play upon our weaknesses and brokenness in order to attract us to their way of thinking. We can be manipulated into illusion.

Jerry Seinfeld

I was in front of an ambulance the other day, and I noticed that the word ambulance was spelled in reverse print on the hood of the ambulance. And I thought, Well, isn't that clever. I look in the rear-view mirror; I can read the word ambulance behind me. Of course while you're reading, you don't see where you're going, you crash. You need an ambulance. I think they're trying to drum up some business on the way back from lunch.

Jerome K. Jerome

The world must be rather a rough place for clever people. Ordinary folk dislike them, and as for themselves, they hate each other most cordially.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Clever people are never credited with their follies: what a deprivation of human rights!

Franz Beckenbauer

Messi is a genius. He has everything. When I watch him, I see a player who is very, very, skilful, very clever and his left foot is like Diego Maradona's.

Jeff Lindsay

I am not shy about admitting my modest talents. For example, I am happy to admit that I am better than average at clever remarks, and I also have a flair for getting people to like me. But to be perfectly fair to myself, I am ever-ready to confess my shortcomings, too, and a quick round of soul-searching forced me to admit that I had never been any good at all at breathing water. As I hung there from the seat belt, dazed and watching the water pour in and swirl around my head, this began to seem like a very large character flaw.

Jeanette Winterson

In this life you have to be your own hero. By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way. Like it or not, you are alone in a forest, just like all those fairy tales that begin with a hero who’s usually stupid but somehow brave, or who might be clever, but weak as a straw, and away he goes (don’t worry about the gender), cheered on by nobody, via the castles and the bears, and the old witch and the enchanted stream, and by and by (we hope) he’ll find the treasure.

Jennifer Stone

I'm accused of cleverness as if it were a sin. She is merely clever, they say.

Jeff Bezos

It's harder to be kind than clever

Jeff Bezos

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

George S. Patton

Pressure makes diamonds

Eoin Colfer

I never tell anyone exactly how clever I am. They would be too scared.

Jasper Fforde

The inspiration comes from everywhere, from what I grew up with. There's so much silliness and nonsense in the world that we regard as normal working procedure. The satirical point of the view may be to counterpoint that. The way we look at classics has been hijacked by the intelligentsia - Shakespeare is highbrow and seen as something clever people do, which isn't right at all. I basically pull inspiration from everywhere.

Hillary Clinton

Every one of us every day has choices to make about the kind of person we are and what we wish to become. You can decide to be someone who brings people together, or you can fall prey to those who wish to divide us. You can be someone who educates yourself, or you can believe that being negative is clever and being cynical is fashionable. You have a choice.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style.... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.

Eva Longoria

That's typical Gabrielle, ... Marc has a very clever plan for this pregnancy. It's going to turn her world upside down

Goodman Ace

TV—a clever contraction, derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. We call it a medium, because nothing's well done.

Gregory David Roberts

There's a truth deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn't always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabhakar told it to me, just as I'm telling it to you now.

Ignatius of Antioch

Christianity is not a matter of persuading people of particular ideas, but of inviting them to share in the greatness of Christ. So pray that I may never fall into the trap of impressing people with clever speech, but instead I may learn to speak with humility, desiring only to impress people with Christ himself.

Ian Bogost

Play isn't you being clever, or finding a trick, or finding a way of covering over your own misery, or persuading someone to do what you want. It's the process of working with the materials that you find and discovering what's possible with them.

Ian Anderson

I don't think successful musicians were really put on this planet in order to have a great time, pat themselves on the back and say, 'Oh, what a clever boy I am!' I think that, like most artists, we were put on the planet to suffer just a little. And we do.

Iain Banks

As a writer, you get to play, you get alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you'd thought of.

Howard Zinn

It had long been true, and prisoners knew this better than anyone, that the poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. This was not just because the poor committed more crimes. In fact, they did. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on their side. But when the rich did commit crimes, they often were not prosecuted, and if they were they could get out on bail, hire clever lawyers, get better treatment from judges. Somehow, the jails ended up full of poor black people.