The cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]

One can not imagine how much cleverness is necessary not to be ridiculous. [ Chamfort ]

Madame X. is a woman of too much wit and cleverness to be ever despised as much as some women less despicable. [ Chamfort ]

Money never can be well managed if sought solely through the greed of money for its own sake. In all meanness there is a defect of intellect as well as of heart. And even the cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

With a pretty face and the freshness of twenty, a woman, however shallow she may be, makes many conquests, but does not retain them: with cleverness, thirty years, and a little beauty, a woman makes fewer conquests but more durable ones. [ A. Dupuy ]

Nowadays enthusiasm is accounted folly; truth, cynicism; dissimulation, self-control; stiffness of manners, dignity; deception, cleverness; hypocrisy, decency; selfishness, economy; freedom of thought, effrontery; and superstition, the prop of human morals. What progress in language!