#cleverness

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

#company #conversation #displaying #drawing #gift

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

#cleverness #clients #instead #job #kill

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

#being #cleverness #entire #evil #extreme

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

#all things #bad #cleverness #evil #excessive

Rabbit's clever," said Pooh thoughtfully. "Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit's clever." "And he has Brain." "Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain." There was a long silence. "I suppose," said Pooh, "that that's why he never understands anything. ↗

— A.A. Milne

#cleverness #humor #piglet #understanding #winnie-the-pooh

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.

#attack #be patient #because #cleverness #courage

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

— Carolyn Wells

#blunder #cleverness #moment #right #right moment

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

— Raymond Chandler

#any #cleverness #decadence #except #incapable

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#people #death

I'm stupid. I can never think of something... ↗