Famous Quotes & Sayings

Mark Twain

At 50, a man can be an ass without being an optimist but not an optimist without being an ass

Mark Twain

The Bible is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. This Bible is built mainly out of fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin. So it noticeably lacks in originality, necessarily. Its three or four most imposing and impressive events all happened in earlier Bibles; there are only two new things in it: hell, for one, and that singular heaven I have told you about.

Mark Twain

A good lawyer knows the law; a clever one takes the judge to lunch.

Marian Keyes

I don't like this idea of division: that if you're a clever woman then you've got to be a particular way. Because men don't. Men please themselves.

John Green

Teenagers are extremely funny, and extremely clever and intellectually curious. But they're also willing to ask questions about the meaning of life without disguising them around irony, and ask questions about what are our responsibilities to other people without having to couch it in irony.

John Green

But it is a pipe." "No, it's not," I said. It's a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It's very clever.

Matt Groening

Everybody is clever, just in their own ways

Mark Helprin

I saw how greatly he suffered the requirement of being clever. It separated him from his soul, and it didn't get him anything other than a living

Mark Haddon

Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.

Mark Haddon

No one wants to know how clever you are. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own.

Michael Nesmith

If you really dig a chick, you should talk to her, not steal her picture.

Mark Lawrence

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.

Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.

Christopher Hitchens

As is so often the case with pieces that appear in the Onion, I honestly could not decide whether this was a clever hoax or not - the arguments were almost exactly as stupid as the real thing.

Chris Shipley

System uptime, data protection, and identity theft are weighty issues. It takes real ingenuity to out-think the fraudsters who are trying to steal identities and hack into enterprise systems. The 12 smart companies that debuted security solutions today at DEMO have designed serious, and seriously clever, innovations.

Gilbert Parker

It's the people who try to be clever who never are; the people who are clever never think of trying to be.

Hans Frank

Both Einstein and Freud were clever in leaving Germany, because both of them would doubtlessly have been caught by Himmler and murdered.

Frances Wright

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.

George Pell

Sometimes the very learned and clever can be brilliantly foolish, especially when seized by an apparently good cause.

George Meyer

Clever is the eunuch version of funny.

G. H. Hardy

As Littlewood said to me once [of the ancient Greeks], they are not clever school boys or "scholarship candidates," but "Fellows of another college."

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sometimes all you need to do to win clever people over to a principle is to present it in the form of a shocking paradox.

John Ruskin

To be able to ask a question clearly is two-thirds of the way to getting it answered.

John Peel

I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones.

Norm MacDonald

I think clever people think that poor people are stupid.

The dummy races are always popular. People get graded for how clever and original the dummy is, how well it goes down the hill and how spectacular the crash is -- it goes over a ski jump. Rumor has it that one of the dummies will look like me this year.

Jonathan Kozol

A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest.

Laura Anne Gilman

Clever's not enough to hold me - I want characters who are more than devices to be moved about for Effect.

Thom Yorke

If I had one wish I'd wish for a million wishes because I am clever.

Terry Pratchett

Things like crowns had a troublesome effect on clever folk; it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle when they tried to think. In a funny sort of way, they were much better at it.

Terry Pratchett

You are very clever," said the old man shyly. "I would like to eat your brains, one day.

Terry Pratchett

This man was so absent-mindedly clever that he could paint pictures that didn’t just follow you around the room but went home with you and did the washing-up.

Terry Gilliam

[Steven Spielberg's films] are comforting, they always give you answers and I don't think they're very clever answers. ... The success of most Hollywood films these days is down to fact that they're comforting. They tie things up in nice little bows and give you answers, even if the answers are stupid, you go home and you don't have to think about it. ... The great filmmakers make you go home and think about it.