Clever Person Quotes

• The moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they realize they're naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism. Literary modernism grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself?...a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller.

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  Philip Pullman

  Clever   Book   Perfect  

  3988

• Any clever person can make plans for winning a war if he has no responsibility for carrying them out.

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  Winston Churchill

  Clever   War   Responsibility  

  Winston Churchill (1986). “The Hinge of Fate”, p.499, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  3526

• The most powerful weapon known is the weapon of blessing. Therefore, a clever person relies on it. He wins with peace, not with war.

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  Laozi

  Clever   Powerful   War  

  2929

• 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

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  Leo Tolstoy

  Inspirational   Children   Clever  

  Leo Tolstoy (2010). “A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Se”, p.112, Simon and Schuster

  4126

• A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

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  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational   Wise   Spiritual  

  4803

• Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.”

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  Philip Pullman

  Clever   Writing   Stories  

  "His Grimm Materials: A Conversation With Philip Pullman". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. November 2012.

  2790

• Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.

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  W. H. Auden

  Song   Clever   Stupid  

  3798

• Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch party. Whatever will he say next? How does he think of those things? He has been deplored once or twice, but feeling is in his favor: he is steadily read. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks.

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  Elizabeth Bowen

  Clever   Stupid   Party  

  558