Definition of Cleverness

Cleverness

The quality of being clever; skill; dexterity; adroitness.

Related Definitions:

Adroitness, Being, Clever, Dexterity, Of, Quality, Skill, The

Cleverness Quotations

If the Great Way perishes there will morality and duty. When cleverness and knowledge arise great lies will flourish. When relatives fall out with one another there will be filial duty and love. When states are in confusion there will be faithful servants.
Lao Tzu

Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.
Plato

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.
Plato

Cleverness is not wisdom.
Euripides

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

The bold are helpless without cleverness.
Euripides

The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

It is a great act of cleverness to be able to conceal one's being clever.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.
Henri Frederic Amiel

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.
Henri Frederic Amiel

Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.
Aleister Crowley

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
Raymond Chandler

Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.
Thomas Huxley

The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.
Harriet Beecher Stowe

Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise... not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.
William Bernbach

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
Stendhal

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.
Herman Hesse

The great gift of conversation lies less in displaying it ourselves than in drawing it out of others. He who leaves your company pleased with himself and his own cleverness is perfectly well pleased with you.
Jean de la Bruyere

Limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the... cleverness that we have to make changes.
Leon Kass

Basically, if you could get a good trailer out of the script, Roger had no objection to you making a really good movie. He liked it if you did. He liked the more cleverness and ingenuity you could bring to it. He just wasn't going to give you any more money.
John Sayles

I kept bugging them about making it more upscale, because I felt Abby, through her cleverness and business sense, was a character who would move up. And that's what she did.
Donna Mills

A man likes his wife to be just clever enough to appreciate his cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it.
Israel Zangwill

We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow, and courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of them ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit.
Tom Brown, Jr.

A blunder at the right moment is better than cleverness at the wrong time.
Carolyn Wells

More Cleverness Quotations

Cleverness Translations

cleverness in German is Klugheit
cleverness in Italian is saggezza
cleverness in Spanish is sapiencia

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