Clever Person Quotes

In 90% of cases, you can start with one of the two most effective ways to open a speech: ask a question or start with a story.

Our brain doesn't remember what we hear. It remembers only what we "see" or imagine while we listen.

You can remember stories. Everything else is quickly forgotten.

Smell is the most powerful sense out of 4 to immerse audience members into a scene.

Every sentence either helps to drive your point home, or it detracts from clarity. There is no middle point.

If you don't have a foundational phrase in your speech, it means that your message is not clear enough to you, and if it's not clear to you, there is no way it will be clear to your audience.

Share your failures first. Show your audience members that you are not any better, smarter or more talented than they are.

You are not an actor, you are a speaker. The main skill of an actor is to play a role; to be someone else. Your main skill as a speaker is to be yourself.

People will forgive you for anything except for being boring. Speaking without passion is boring. If you are not excited about what you are talking about, how can you expect your audience to be excited?

Never hide behind a lectern or a table. Your audience needs to see 100% of your body.

Speak slowly and people will consider you to be a thoughtful and clever person.

Leaders don't talk much, but each word holds a lot of m ~ Andrii Sedniev

There's a difference between a clever person and a smart one. Smart people make their own ways, and clever people use their minds to usurp opportunities to walk on the paths made by others. ~ Waheed Ibne Musa

There is never a right time to break someone's heart. And anyone with even a microgram of sensitivity in his or her body will agonise for an age over that timing. Only problem is there is always some reason not to make someone unhappy. The day a relationship end, if that relationship was at all important to the suckers involved, becomes as important an anniversary as a wedding day or birthday.
Obviously, the average person doesn't want to kick someone they once loved while that person is down.
It's not just hard times when someone is down that become obstacles to making your getaway. After times of bereavement, unemployment and general unhappiness, those events that should be happy ones also make some times off limits for the eager would- be dumper. Christmas, birthdays, Easter all impossible. A clever person with a sensitive lover that they sense is not quite as into them as he or she used to be, could starve off the inevitable for years by carefully spacing out this crucial dates. ~ Chris Manby

A clever person can tell them the truth in a way that they want to hear. ~ T.J. Kirk

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." ~ Philip Pullman

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

The gap between a dumb and a clever person may appear large from an anthropocentric perspective, yet in a less parochial view the two have nearly indistinguishable minds. ~ Nick Bostrom

How we would like to argue with September, and tell her that in the waiting lies the pleasure! That we here in the world of sensible folk know how to wait without twisted-up bellies and tapping feet and wishing for the sun to hurry up and rise and set. That a clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever. But though I am sly, I am a trickster, I am even cruel - I cannot lie. ~ Catherynne M Valente

A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. ~ Albert Einstein

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. ~ W. H. Auden

That a clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever. ~ Catherynne M Valente

The stupid person's idea of the clever person. [on Aldous Huxley, in Spectator magazine, 1936] ~ Elizabeth Bowen

If you want to be a clever person, you have to learn how to ask cleverly, how to listen attentively, how to respond quietly, and how to stop talking when there is nothing more to say. ~ Leo Tolstoy

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. ~ Philip Pullman

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. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

All it takes is one person in any generation to heal a family's limiting beliefs. ~ Gregg Braden

Knowing when and where to sit is something every young executive should learn. A junior person who comes barging into a room and takes any seat he wants catches the disapproving eye of senior management. ~ Letitia Baldrige

How magical can a person be when she is blessed with infinite kindness? ~ Debasish Mridha

One is always changing. I don't want to write the same book and I couldn't, because I'm a different person. ~ Nicole Krauss

So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused. ~ Hermann Hesse

So if a person produces an object on command, Humboldt wrote, we may admire what he did but we will despise what he is, not a true human being who acts in his own impulses and desires. ~ Noam Chomsky

I can never be a person who has not made mistakes. But I can be someone honest who has lived through them: one of those who look you square in the eye and say, 'This is how it has been, and it is okay. ~ George Hodgman

Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, nor had I the least idea of what had just happened to me. I did not know who I was, nor where I was; I felt neither pain, fear, nor anxiety. I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream, without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me. I felt throughout my whole being such a wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I'm a MySpace person. ~ Teyana Taylor

Despite his words, Lee knew that with someone like Wren, the amount of time didn't really matter all that much. She was the kind of person who could leave a mark with just one meeting. ~ Stephanie Fournet

The living are always trying to find the shortcuts to happiness in life. But look what happens when someone achieves premature success: they bloom too early and spend the rest of their lives dying....Success without struggle warps a person. ~ Susan Wells Bennett

Love demanded this of everyone. To care, not just about one person, but about the whole world. To work for justice, not just for those we know, but for everyone we don't. To keep not just our loved ones safe, but also keep the beloveds of strangers safe. To treat others with as much dignity and respect as we ourselves wish to be treated. ~ Rivera Sun

No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong. ~ Walter E. Williams

Titus's jaw dropped. 'Those caravanists, they were mages?'
'They most certainly were.'
'But one fainted and two reached for their rifles when they saw the sand wyvern.'
'It's a good policy for at least one member of the group to pretend to fall unconscious at a mage sighting. And I always think the rifles are a touch of genius - any time you see someone holding a firearm, your instinct is to dismiss that person as a nonmage. ~ Sherry Thomas

Stories in themselves are not automatically good; it has to be the right kind of story told by the right kind of person. ~ Douglas Wilson

You know, I get it. Being raised as a superstar must be really, really difficult for you. Always a commodity, never a human being, not a single person in your family thinking you're worth a damn off the court - yeah, sounds rough. Kevin and I talk about your intricate and endless daddy issues all the time. I know it's not entirely your fault that you are mentally unbalanced and infected with these delusions of grandeur, and I know you're physically incapable of holding a decent conversation with anyone like every other normal human being can, but I don't think any of us should have to put up with this much of your bullshit. Pity only gets you so many concessions, and you used yours up about six insults ago. So please, please, just shut the fuck up and leave us alone. ~ Nora Sakavic

By nature, I am a low-key person and like being behind the camera. ~ Rohit Shetty

Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it "well-roundedness," a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. ~ Peter Thiel

Psychosynthesis is interested in the whole building. We try to build an elevator which will allow a person access to every level of his personality. After all, a building with only a basement is very limited. We want to open up the terrace where you can sun-bathe or look at the stars. Our concern is the synthesis of all areas of the personality. That means psychosynthesis is holistic, global and inclusive. It is not against psychoanalysis or even behavior modification but it insists that the needs for meaning, for higher values, for a spiritual life, are as real as biological or social needs. We deny that there are any isolated human problems. ~ Roberto Assagioli

A clever conjurer is welcome anywhere, and those of us whose powers of entertainment are limited to the setting of booby-traps or the arranging of apple-pie beds must view with envy the much greater tribute of laughter and applause which is the lot of the prestidigitator with some natural gift for legerdemain. ~ A.A. Milne

When you give a lesson in meanness to a critter or a person, don't be surprised if they learn their lesson. ~ Will Rogers

The artist's life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him; on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life and on the other, a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire ... there are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire. ~ C. G. Jung

The course of history is determined not by battles, by sieges, or usurpation, but by the individuals. The strongest army is, at its most basic level, a collection of individuals. Their decisions, their passions, their foolishness, and their dreams shape the years to come. If there is any lesson to be learned from history, it is that all too often the fate of armies, of cities, of entire realms rests upon the actions of one person's decision, good or bad, right or wrong, big or small, can unwittingly change the world.
But history can be quite the slattern. One never knows who that person is, where he might be, or what decision he might male.
It is almost enough to make me believe in destiny. ~ Jim Butcher

God is equally near to everything and every place and is equally ready to give himself, so far as in him lies, and therefore a person shall know him aright who knows how to see him the same, under all circumstances. ~ Meister Eckhart

Communication feels like it should be the simplest thing, but it's not. Sometimes you don't even understand what you're feeling. You don't know how to put that into words, so how are you suppose to tell the person you love that you're upset. ~ Taissa Farmiga

Does "doing exactly what I want" mean not thinking about other people's feelings? Because that's just not the kind of person I am.
Maybe it can mean whatever I want it to mean, like taking care of myselfand not letting people walk over me. ~ Carolyn Mackler

When you see a person acting violently, ask yourself whether he knows how powerful he is. If he knew his power, would he feel the need to assert it? ~ Vironika Tugaleva

Activism isn't about holding your faults up to the light. That's what comedy is about, it's about saying, 'Look at this person who is so flawed and frail and damaged. And we're all this frail and damaged so let's laugh at it.' ~ Scott Thompson

I have my dream job! As a young person training as an actor, walking on the WB studio lot is a dream in itself. ~ Keegan Allen

A fallen person who is away from God and who is without God is altogether an embodiment of opinion. It ~ Witness Lee

Always listen to the parent who doesn't like who you love. They can smell a mistake. Of course, you don't find this out until you realize that the person you fell in love with is different from the person you married. Some men are good at fooling you. ~ Terry McMillan

Loss creates a greater overall surface area within a person. You expand as a result of it. Though it may very well feel like the opposite. ~ Augusten Burroughs

The person following is never in control, which she knows full well and which is exactly why she does it. ~ Sara Gruen

No person shall be capable of being a delegate for more than three years in any term of six. ~ Thomas Jefferson

If you educate a man you educate a person, but if you educate a woman you educate a family ~ Brigham Young

Things that don't matter at all to one person can hurt another so deeply it seems as bad as dying. ~ Banana Yoshimoto

...the most sacred right of a person is to refuse o be manipulated, handled, cheated, and then kicked in the ass---. ~ Romain Gary

The English language has about 450,000 commonly used words, but more may be needed. What to you call someone who has lost a sibling or had a miscarriage? Or a gay person whose partner has died? Or an elderly person who has lost every friend and relative? So many heartaches can't be found in the dictionary. ~ Jeffrey Zaslow

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait. ~ Salvador Dali

I'm adorable, first off. My sense of humor is stellar - obvs."
"Obvs," she echoes dryly.
"I'm extraordinarily skilled in the art of conversation."
She nods. "When it's about yourself, of course."
"Of course." I pretend to think it over some more. "Oh, and I'm a mind reader. No lie. I always know what the other person is thinking."
"Yeah? What am I thinking right now?" Allie challenges.
"That you want me to shut up and fuck you again."
She shakes her head in dismay. "Goddamn it. That's actually what I was thinking."
I smirk at her and tap my forehead. "Told ya. Mind reader. ~ Elle Kennedy

A person needed savings in order to move, but more than that he needed gumption. ~ David Sedaris

I'm not the guy who bursts into the room. I'm the most insecure person you'll meet if you get to know me. ~ John Stamos

If we grow wiser and more learned in our intercourse with wise and learned persons, how much more will we gain in our inner life by communing with God in prayer. ~ Huldrych Zwingli

It was the most important art a person could learn: self-control. ~ Henning Mankell

It wasn't as if she'd thought it through or anything, how what a person wanted wasn't always what they needed, and what a person needed might be the last thing they could ever want. ~ Shannon Celebi

A person wrapped up in himself makes a small package. ~ Harry Emerson Fosdick