Craftiness Quotes:

To make a living, craftiness is better than learnedness.

- Pierre Beaumarchais

topic: Craftiness

The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots and the bankers went anew to grab the riches. I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America and use it to systematically corrupt civilization.

- Otto von Bismarck

source: "The C.S.L.T.: containing views on Abraham Lincoln as expressed by Bismarck in 1878, from the recollections of Conrad von Bauditz Siem". Book by Conrad von Bauditz Siem, 1915.

topic: Money, Men, Civilization, Monetary System, Craftiness

My God, Sweetness beyond words, make bitter all the carnal comfort that draws me from love of the eternal and lures me to its evil self by the sight of some delightful good in the present. Let it not overcome me, my God. Let not flesh and blood conquer me. Let not the world and its brief glory deceive me, nor the devil trip me by his craftiness. Give me courage to resist, patience to endure, and constancy to persevere. Give me the soothing unction of Your spirit rather than all the consolations of the world, and in place of carnal love, infuse into me the love of Your name.

- Thomas a Kempis

source: Thomas (à Kempis), Thomas A. Kempis, Aloysius Croft, Harold Bolton (2003). “The Imitation of Christ”, p.74, Courier Corporation

topic: Love, Sight, Self, Lure, Craftiness

Of course I'm trying to trick you! That's the way of the world, Baudelaires. Everyone runs around with their secrets and their schemes, trying to outwit everyone else.

- Daniel Handler

source: "The End". Book by Daniel Handler, 2006.

topic: Running, Secret, Trying, Outwitting, Baudelaire

If there were a god of New York, it would be the Greek's Hermes, the Roman's Mercury. He embodies New York qualities: the quick exchange, the fastness of language and style, craftiness, the mixing of people and crossing of borders, imagination.

- James Hillman

topic: New York, Imagination, People, Craftiness, Hermes

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

- Jack Kerouac

topic: Art, Writing, Feelings, Deleting, One Sentence

This fear of criticism displayed by the advocates of freedom of criticism cannot be attributed solely to craftiness. No, the majority of the Economists look with sincere resentment upon all theoretical controversies, factional disagreements, broad political questions, plans for organising revolutionaries, etc.

- Vladimir Lenin

source: Vladimir Il'ich Lenin (1975). “Izbrannye Proizvedenii͡a V Trekh Tomakh”

topic: Political, Criticism, Majority, Craftiness

The zest for life of those unusual men and women who make a great zealous success of living is due more often in good part to the craftiness and pertinacity with which they manage to overlook the misery of others. You can watch them watch life beat the stuffing out of the faces of their friends and acquaintances, although they themselves seem to outwit the dense delays of social custom, the tedious tick-tock of bureaucratic obfuscation, accepting loss and age and change and disappointment without suffering punctures in their stomach lining.

- Edward Hoagland

topic: Life, Disappointment, Loss, Obfuscation, Zest For Life