Smart Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The Venn Diagram of guys who don't like smart girls and guys you don't want to date is a circle.

Seize what's been handed you. Make smart decisions. Make decisions because life is a temporary situation.

James Patterson

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead so doing something worthwhile for his country. So maybe he owes all of us an apology...

There are plenty who think that, as our libel laws are cleaned up, smart lawyers are switching horses to privacy.

Alan Rusbridger

I just want to say that um, I'm just really, really shocked at like how nice our world is because it's just so nice. Like oh my God! Like, the other day, like I was sitting there and I saw these magazines and they said I was pregnant, and like, it's so true. Like America, believe everything you read. Because, like, you're smart and I'm stupid. Like for real. Come on y'all.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I think it's possible to be too quick-witted, too smart to be an actor. You have to turn off a lot of your brain, in a way. When you see a fellow actor just missing it, it's hard to keep your mouth shut, but you have to. Or see a director so stupid he couldn't direct vomit into a paper bag. And he's in charge, and it's really hard to keep your mouth shut.

William H. Macy

My vision for this book and the others in the series is to let people know what kind of commanders we have. You don't pick generals off park benches. … They are experts at what they do and lot of thinking goes into it. And I want to get across to people the intellectual dimension of command, to let people know that it's hard to be a general. And the people we have with general stars on their shoulders are pretty smart and pretty good guys.

Like other potentates with a long habit of arbitrary authority, she covered her perplexity with a smart show of decision.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I figured that I wasn't as smart or talented as the other kids around, so I just had to work twice as hard. Surprisingly, results showed quickly. I was hooked!

- Report...

A cow and calf are cut in half
And placed in separate cases
To call it art, however smart
Casts doubt on art's whole basis.

Mom is always saying I'm a smart kid, but that I just don't apply myself.

Jeff Kinney (author)

Great stories agree with our worldview. The best stories don't teach people anything new. Instead the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the thirst place.

I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?