Cunning Quotes

The weak in courage is strong in cunning. (William Blake)
An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie. View quote
H. G. Wells
Every man of action has a strong dose of egoism, pride, hardness, and cunning. But all those things will be regarded as high qualities if he can make them the means to achieve great ends. View quote
Giorgos Seferis
Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses. View quote
William Hazlitt
Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite. View quote
Thomas Carlyle
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods. View quote
Iris Murdoch
No man is so much a fool as not to have wit enough sometimes to be a knave; nor any so cunning a knave as not to have the weakness sometimes to play the fool. View quote
George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax
In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning. View quote
A. E. Housman
None speak of the bravery, the might, or the intellect of Jesus; but the devil is always imagined as a being of acute intellect, political cunning, and the fiercest courage. These universal and instinctive tendencies of the human mind reveal much. View quote
Lydia Maria Child
Happy people are ignoramuses and glory is nothing else but success, and to achieve it one only has to be cunning. View quote
Mikhail Lermontov
Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom. (Cicero)
The greatest cunning is to have none at all. View quote
Carl Sandburg
There are hunters, and there are victims. By your discipline, cunning, obedience, and alertness, you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim. View quote
James Mattis
Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise. View quote
Francis Bacon
Thus by such victory, not by machines but in oppositions to the principle to the principles of machines, has the freedom of states been preserved by the cunning of architects. View quote
Vitruvius
Cunning... is but the low mimic of wisdom. View quote
Plato
Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed. View quote
Richard Adams
In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit. View quote
Charles Krauthammer
The enterprise of Adolf Hitler, with all its clatter and fireworks, and all its cunning and dynamic energy, is the enterprise of an evil spirit, which is apparently allowed its freedom for a time in order to test our faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. View quote
Karl Barth
Every man wishes to be wise, and they who cannot be wise are almost always cunning. View quote
Samuel Johnson
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty. (Jean Genet)
Cunning is only the mimic of discretion, and may pass upon weak men in the same manner as vivacity is often mistaken for wit, and gravity for wisdom. View quote
Joseph Addison
Envy, like the worm, never runs but to the fairest fruit; like a cunning bloodhound, it singles out the fattest deer in the flock. View quote
Francis Beaumont
Optimism has always seemed to me the cunning alibi of egoists, anxious to cover up their state of chronic self-satisfaction. They are optimists in order to avoid pitying other men and their misfortune. ~~ Yet pity is a vexed question. View quote
Georges Bernanos
A proper secrecy is the only mystery of able men; mystery is the only secrecy of weak and cunning ones. View quote
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield