I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself. Sometimes I am so clever I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style.... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.
A stiff letter galls one like a stiff shirt collar -- whilst a sheet garnished here and there with a careless blot -- and here and there a dash -- but in the main full of excellent matter, is like a clever fellow in a dirty shirt whom we value for the good humour he brings with him and not for the garb he wears.
The most powerful political moments for me come when I feel like my actions are aligned with a certain truth. I can feel it. When I'm talking to a group and I'm saying something truthful, I can feel a power that comes out of those statements that is different than when I'm just being glib or clever.
Your fingertips across my skin, The palm trees swaying in the wind, Images. You sang me Spanish lullabies, The sweetest sadness in your eyes, Clever trick... I cannot go to the ocean, I cannot drive the streets at night, I cannot wake up in the morning without you on my mind, So now you're gone and I'm haunted, And I bet you are just fine. Did I make it that easy to walk right in and out of my life?..
Yet, isn't it strange, isn't it weird, how we can KNOW that someone is not behaving in the way we imagine, and at the same time we can be totally convinced that he is! How clever the human mind is, that it can accept two contradictory things as 'facts.' Yes, I know that in this case one 'fact' was untrue. But the human mind can KNOW something is untrue and still accept it as a 'fact,' and act on it as if it were true.
People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing-refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.
All great events hang by a single thread. The clever man takes advantage of everything, neglects nothing that may give him some added opportunity; the less clever man, by neglecting one thing, sometimes misses everything.
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.
And still I look for the men who will dare to be
roses of England
wild roses of England
men who are wild roses of England
with metal thorns, beware!
but still more brave and still more rare
the courage of rosiness in a cabbage world
fragrance of roses in a stale stink of lies
rose-leaves to bewilder the clever fools
and rose-briars to strangle the machine.