Smart Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

To have success in science, you need some luck.
But to succeed in science, you need a lot more than luck. And it's not enough to be smart — lots of people are very bright and get nowhere in life. In my view, you have to combine intelligence with a willingness not to follow conventions when they block your path forward.

James Dewey Watson

Of David Icke:

He's either a smart opportunist conman, or he's completely insane, or he's working for them directly. But I tend to think he's just a conman who understands how things work and is just a real opportunist.

It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you.

Charlotte Brontë

Young horses who cannot bear the whip or spur find life hard. At every smart they start forward and rush to their destruction, and when the way is stony and difficult, they know no better expedient than to overturn the cart and gallop madly away.

Selma Lagerlöf

A smart daughter ought not to examine her future husband too closely. She ought to consider it a pleasure to find one agreeable to her father.

Alain-René Lesage

I began to realize that my parents were going to build the biggest damn house in the whole town! I was shocked! Are we rich? I asked my brother. Yes, he said. We are? Then why do I always wear dirty, old work clothes? I asked. Because we're ranchers, said my brother. We're not city people. Oh, I said, then it's okay for us to be dirty? We aren't dirty, he said, laughing. To be dirty means you never wash. We wash our clothes and take baths all the time. It's just that people that live on a ranch get dirt on themselves. My eyes went big. I'd never thought of this. My brother was really smart.

Victor Villaseñor

There are two kinds of people in this world : those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.

What a lovely display of personhood. He's like a good book cover that grabs your gaze. Read me. I'm fun but smart. You won't be able to put me down.

In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.

Richard Feynman

Even while acknowledging that Washington is broken and that Americans have lost faith and trust in government, all President Obama could offer was more interference and government mandates as solutions to the problems government itself has created. His latest gem: smart regulations to prevent irresponsible behavior. Government is not just broken. It is running out of control, destroying our lives, our liberty, our security and our livelihood.

Thank God I never lost that childlike innocence and the purity of vision and naivete. …That childlike innocence was most useful, because if I was a bit wiser, I wouldn't have been able to do anything, perhaps. So I'm glad I was not smart.

In the new conditions created by the global economy, the information revolution and the growth of smart technologies, it is more necessary than ever for all companies to be guided by their rich spiritual inheritance, as spiritual enterprises.

On the other hand, I think cats have Asperger's. Like me, they're very smart. And like me, sometimes they simply need to be left alone.

I got used to dealing with groups of boys and getting on with life in unpleasant circumstances and being smart and funny and subversive at the expense of authority.

Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the same time... Creative individuals have a combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I know the American people understand the stakes in Iraq. They want to win. They will support the war as long as they see a path to victory. Americans can have confidence that we will prevail because thousands of smart, dedicated military and civilian personnel are risking their lives and are working around the clock to ensure our success.

He reclined on a delightfully cushioned lounge in the sprawling ranch Paris had rented. In Dallas, Texas, of all places. Promiscuity had decked himself out, too, wearing a Stetson (weird), no shirt (understandable), unfastened jeans (smart) and cowboy boots (weird again). Dude looked ready to rustle cattle or something.

Poetry is not a branch of analytical philosophy. It is a primal, holistic kind of human communication. A poet needs innocence as much as knowledge, emotion as much as intelligence, vulnerability as much as rigor. A poet can become too smart for his or her own good and forget the childlike pleasures of sound and story, sense, and sensuality that poetry should provide. The challenge for a writer is to master the medium of poetry without losing that inner innocence.

Being conscious of having done a wicked action leaves stings of remorse behind it, which, like an ulcer in the flesh, makes the mind smart with perpetual wounds; for reason, which chases away all other pains, creates repentance, shames the soul with confusion, and punishes it with torment.

Lake Wobegon, where smart doesn't count for so much. A minister has to be able to read a clock. At noon, it's time to go home and turn up the pot roast and get the peas out of the freezer.

Garrison Keillor

We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal intelligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to real events.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

We believe in only the government we need, but we insist on all the government we need.
We believe in a government that is characterized by fairness and reasonableness, a reasonableness that goes beyond labels, that doesn't distort or promise to do things that we know we can't do.
We believe in a government strong enough to use words like "love" and "compassion" and smart enough to convert our noblest aspirations into practical realities.
We believe in encouraging the talented, but we believe that while survival of the fittest may be a good working description of the process of evolution, a government of humans should elevate itself to a higher order.

If I was smart enough to be a doctor, I'd be a doctor. I ain't, so I'm a football player.

No, I wasn't very smart, this I knew, but I was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, I was some kind of crazy-loco genius, burro genius. I mean, to have been able to hold on to my Spirit for this long had to mean something.

Victor Villaseñor

Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.