Source: Clockwork Angel
“Hardly any man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.”
Il n'y a guère d'homme assez habile pour connaître tout le mal qu'il fait.
Maxim 269.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
“I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.”
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest
“Never be clever for the sake of being clever
For the sake of showing off.”
"So You Want To Write A Fugue", work's text
note (c. 1945), quoted in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) by James Gleick, p. 204
“You are a particularly clever girl: almost as clever as you are appealing to the eye.”
Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), The Green Pearl (1985), Chapter 16, section 3 (p. 635)
This is an advantage which scientists enjoy over most other people engaged in intellectual pursuits, and they enjoy it at all levels of capability. To be a first-rate scientist it is not necessary (and certainly not sufficient) to be extremely clever, anyhow in a pyrotechnic sense. One of the great social revolutions brought about by scientific research has been the democratization of learning. Anyone who combines strong common sense with an ordinary degree of imaginativeness can become a creative scientist, and a happy one besides, in so far as happiness depends upon being able to develop to the limit of one's abilities.
1960s, Lucky Jim, 1968
“Men are only too clever at shifting blame from their own shoulders to those of others.”
Book XXVIII, sec. 25
History of Rome
