Smart Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

He always said she was smart, but their conversations were a mined field in which at any moment she might make the wrong verbal move and find her ignorance exploding in her face.

If General Haig is so smart, why did he finish 214th (out of 310) in his graduating class at West Point? Does that mean there are 213 generals his age who are smarter than he is?

You should take a good look at all sides of an issue before making a decision. Put something away in case of an emergency. New neighbors will bring good cheer. A small problem may occur at home base, but you will solve it quickly and correctly. Don't offer smart advice unless you are really asked to comment.

All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95% of Americans are "scientifically illiterate." That's...the same fraction...of slaves who were illiterate before the Civil War...

It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques.

We're just animals, creatures smart enough and unlucky enough to have figured out we're alive, and we're going to die without ever knowing any purpose. We can pretend all we want and we can wish all we want, but that basic existential fact remainswe can't know.

No matter how smart you are, you're smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.

One of these suburbs is actually named Stalingrad, which goes to show that the French have learned nothing about politics since they guillotined all the smart people in 1793.

The heart resolves this matter in a trice, "Men only feel the smart, but not the vice.

Essentially, we humans live well enough and long enough, and are smart enough, to generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads.

Robert Sapolsky

The Compound Effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices

Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable. Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity.

Robert Greene (American author)

I most fear stupid people. Stupid people will do anything. Truly smart people will do only what is logical for them to do.

What we mean by maturity in people's thinking is not a matter of how smart they are, but it is a matter of the order of consciousness in which they exercise their smartness or their lack of it.

If the people in Europe are SOOOOOO smart, how come so many of them can't seem to locate the deodorant, huh?

Our greatest hope is for the experience of joy, and often we are not as smart as we think we are when it comes to predicting what would bring us that joy... Hope that is attached to a particular outcome is looking for pleasure but fishing for pain, because attachment itself is a source of pain. It is best to hope for an experience of life in all its fullness-a life that can embrace both joy and sorrow, and will still be at peace.

Marianne Williamson

You can be a giant among artists without ever attaining any great skill. Facility is a dangerous thing. When there is too much technical ease the brain stops criticizing. Don't let the hand fall into a smart way of putting the mind to sleep.

The facts are in: diverse companies and teams consistently outperform all others. It's not only the smart thing and the right thing, it makes getting the job done much more interesting.

Marilyn C. Nelson

I met Donald [Trump] in 1979 when I was sent to New York to organize Ronald Reagan's campaign for President. He and his father Fred Trump were members of the Reagan for President finance committee. We became good friends. I was invited to two of his weddings. He attended my wedding in Washington DC. He is very smart, very tough and can be very very funny. He is also very tall.

It is always disillusioning to weigh your fish and measure your golf drives. Smart men estimate them.

Havilah Babcock

Know how to use evasion. That is how smart people get out of difficulties.

Baltasar Gracián

All too often, we do smart things only after exhausting every conceivable dumb thing we could have done.

The organizations of the future are filled with smart, fast, flexible people on a mission

A smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it.

We can't all be Einstein (because we don't all play the violin). At the very least, we need a sort of street-smart science: the ability to recognize evidence, gather it, assess it, and act on it.