Top 1200 Very Clever Quotes & Sayings - Page 17

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

I went up to Prince and said 'I'm a big fan of your stuff' and he looked at me and just walked off...left me standing there like a ****. He's a prat, but a clever prat.

One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.

Marketing yourself to a new person often involves being charismatic, clever and quick-but most jobs and most relationships are about being consistent, persistent and brave.

I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful; people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can't.

'Throne of Glass' readers tend to be passionate, talented, clever, and welcoming - in fact, I'm consistently moved by just how welcoming 'TOG' readers are to new fans.

There is no essential difference between the material of comedy and tragedy. All depends on the point of view of the dramatist, which, by clever emphasis, he tries to make the point of view of his audience.

As so often, the ordinary rank and file of the electorate have seen a truth, an important fact, which has escaped so many more clever people - the underlying value of that which is traditional, of that which is prescriptive.

In the next few years I'd love to play a female version of Doctor Who. I know exactly how I would play her - she would be crafty in a clever kind of way.

I used to feel more straight for certain months and then just think about boys all the time I'm attracted to women who are very, very boyish. I'm not very big on big mammaries. I have a tendency to be attracted to very, very boyish girls. And usually very feminine men.

'Higher Power' was the result of a personal experience: a friend of mine who went through the process of addiction and recovery. It's a very, very tough thing - very easy to become addicted and very, very hard to become a recovering addict.

In the morning, I never cleanse. I just splash my face with water and pat it dry. I honestly think that the human body is a clever thing and that the natural oils my skin produces are best for it. Then I apply a dab of rouge, and I'm off.

You know, the mark of intelligence is realizing when you're making the same mistake over and over and over again, and not hitting your head in the wall five hundred times before you understand that it's not a clever thing to do.

Many sci-fi authors, we know, are as clever and tricky as so many Coyotes. Ms. Le Guin, though, has matured from the vividness and imagination she had from the beginning into wisdom and a clearsightedness that reaches past sympathy.

Try to be original in your play and as clever as possible; but don't be afraid to show yourself foolish; we must have freedom of thinking, and only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.

I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty—everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?

Compared with my brother, I always felt like Richard III, some clever humpbacked thing who surpassed him in the end. He was the one who read books, but I became the writer. He painted and drew, but I was the one who got accepted by the High School of Music and Art.

When, in his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan famously said government is the problem, not the solution, he established the Republican mantra that has not changed in all the years since. It was a clever bit of rhetoric, but it has turned too many Republicans into economic simpletons.

Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes are very, very smooth. But geometry had laid them aside because they were too complicated.

Mr. Fulbright hasn't said anything new or interesting or clever in five years; his intellectual well dried up the day after Walter Lippmann stopped writing his regular column.

Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Unfortunately scripts don't chase me. I chase them. I struggle, battle, discard, pick it back, struggle further, plead with it, curse it, cajole and try to be clever. But it is invariably the script that rules.

People forget how outcast 'They Might Be Giants' can be. They have a reputation for writing really deft, funny, clever melodies, and they also make a lot of music for kids, which is terrific, but when you see them in concert, they can rock the house.

The coaches of some players who are my own age keep saying publically about me: "This guy is going to be one of the greats." I am clever enough to know that they do not truthfully think so. They are trying to shake my confidence. Of course, this is a matter of tactics.

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.

This is simple meditation, nothingness and everythingness, the color and the form, death and the void, the end and the beginning, a beginningless end with an endless beginning, Pretty clever if you ask me.

Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.

We live in this world like a child who enters a room where a clever person is speaking. The child did not hear the beginning of the speech, and he leaves before the end; and there are certain things which he hears but does not understand

Starting probably with Janeane Garofalo and that era of stand-up ladies who were starting to be more brainy and strong and clever, guys started noticing those girls as sexy smart. I always called it smarxy.

California is many things, and it is a harbinger of what this country will become if illegal immigration isn't stopped. You're gonna have a very rich, very powerful minority of elites - very, very tiny - and they're gonna live in a very few, small, gated enclaves.

Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend.

I wouldn't agree with people saying Lil Wayne is wack, you know what I mean? Because I've heard Lil Wayne records many times and he say a lot of clever things.

The ladies usually go for the biggest damn fool they can find; that is why the human race stands where it does today: we have bred the clever and lasting Casanovas, all hollow inside, like the chocolate Easter bunnies we foster upon our poor children.

I thought the marketing was really smart and really clever and unique at the time. It positioned 'Saw' as a horror film that was different from the other horror films that were in the crowded marketplace.

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

A refrigerator, to me, isn't as clever an appliance as people would have you believe. To me, it's a cold limbo, a temporary reprieve from the inevitability of spoilage. The freezer, on the other hand, is a far more satisfying solution for keeping foods at their best.

Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.

Japanese is a baby talk - very, very hard to read, very, very, easy to talk. ... A very faint kind of language.

You should read Wodehouse when you're well and when you're poorly;when you're travelling, and when you're not;when you're feeling clever, and when you're feeling utterly dim. Wodehouse always lifts your spirits,no matter how high they happen to be already.

I rode my bike to school, I was the head girl, I played the violin, was really nerdy. I was really underweight, so I was really skinny and under-confident. But I had Doc Marten boots! So I was a bit of an outsider. And clever as well.

Christmas in Bethlehem. The earliest dream: a cold, clear night made bright by a magnificent star, the smell of anger, marshals and clever men falling to their knees in love of the lovely baby, the avatar of faultless love...!!!

The world is a very troubled, very chaotic place. It's a very cold place. It's a very unjust and unfair place in many ways. [As a moviemaker] I have very limited ability to have an impact over all that.

To pronounce something clever and honest is not such a big deal, lots of them have been said and written. For a statement of truth to be effective and for it to make people wiser, it has to be filtered through the soul of a highest quality, the soul of an artist.

Clever derivatives broke dozens of companies. It killed them. Bankrupt. We don't need these kinds of innovation in finance. It's OK to be boring in finance. What we want is innovation in widgets.

You count snouts,” Straha said. “Whichever side can persuade most snouts to join it prevails. It does not have to be clever. It does not have to be wise. It only needs to be popular.

I had come to believe that I was not as clever as some other kids who were my friends. And yet I knew even then that I wanted to do something of an intellectual nature, and excel at it. I also realized that if I was going to succeed at all, it would be through hard work.

Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power.

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.

The Labour party still really has no idea why their people voted for Brexit. They still think that basically it's naive Labour voters being conned by terribly clever Tories.

Nothing, my dear and clever colleague, is not your run-of-the-mill nothing, the result of idleness and inactivity, but dynamic, aggressive Nothingness, that is to say, perfect, unique, ubiquitous, in other words Nonexistence, ultimate and supreme.

Cleverness is a burden after that. You are supposed to settle down and be a good person, raise your children, and be good to your friends, which you may not have been back when you were clever.

I defend my position. I am not Messi. I am not Ronaldo. I have something else. I am not the quickest, like Walcott. I have to be clever and read situations. If I didn't have that, I wouldn't be able to play Premier League. Everybody has a strength - this is mine.

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

If you're going to have a book full of clever people and nobody ever jokes, it's just not going to ring true to the reader. That said, humor writing is the hardest kind of writing there is.

She has her gown nicely in place tonight, doesn't she? Black velvet and sparkles, not a thread left hanging. Clever girl, this city. Even the sky is her friend.

Obviously people want social calm, but if you do not let clever and ingenious people to participate, obviously there must be some dormant volcano that will erupt, sooner or later.

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.

One way to think of the tax system is as a massive Swiss cheese. Each hole is an exemption created by a chancellor in pursuit of good headlines - a hole waiting to be filled by the clever accountants who work for Starbucks or Jimmy Carr.

It's weird; my fascination with tech was kind of combined with the fact that my parents would never pay for anything. It got me more involved because I would have to find clever ways to get things for free.

The great Chinese classics have always said that it's better not to fight; that the clever man achieves his ends without violence; that a battle delayed is better than a battle fought.