Benjamin Hoff Quotes

Cynics know the answers without having penetrated deeply enough to know the questions. When challenged by mysterious truths, they marshall 'facts.

People habituate themselves to let things pass through their minds, as one may speak, rather than to think of them. Thus by use they become satisfied merely with seeing what is said, without going any further. Review and attention, and even forming a judgment, becomes fatigue; and to lay anything before them that requires it, is putting them quite out of their way.

A lot of critics are lazy. They don't want to look closely and analyze something for what it is. They take a quick first impression and then rush to compare it to something they've seen before.

It amazes me sometimes that even intelligent people will analyze a situation or make a judgement after only recognizing the standard or traditional structure of a piece.

I thought journalism would enable me to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

There is but a shallow stream of thought in history.

But am I clever and right or clever and wrong?

It is no small mischief to a boy, that many of the best years of his life should be devoted to the learning of what can never be of any real use to any human being. His mind is necessarily rendered frivolous and superficial by the long habit of attaching importance to words instead of things; to sound instead of sense.

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

There are men who can think no deeper than a fact.

Education without social action is a one-sided value because it has no true power potential. Social action without education is a weak expression of pure energy. Deeds uninformed by educated thought can take false directions. When we go into action and confront our adversaries, we must be as armed with knowledge as they. Our policies should have the strength of deep analysis beneath them to be able to challenge the clever sophistries of our opponents.

Clever people, people who are cunning, do not know what love is because their minds are so sharp, because they are so clever, because they are so superficial - which means to be on the surface, and love is not a thing that exists on the surface.

When people look only at the surface and that satisfies them and they think from that surface they see, that is to be truly blind.

A stupid person can make only certain, limited types of errors; the mistakes open to a clever fellow are far broader. But to the one who knows how smart he is compared to everyone else, the possibilities for true idiocy are boundless.

Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right.

It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws.

I wish people were willing to dig a little deeper than the surface elements of a premise before tossing one story in with another.

The world is satisfied with words, few care to dive beneath the surface.

Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.

If you are creative enough to imagine a problem, you're clever enough to discover a solution.

A lot of clever people have got everything except judgement

Instead of seeking wisdom, liberals desire to be seen as clever by being counterintuitive, crazy, and outre.

If you don't look at yourself and evaluate it, you instead see how the world's reacting to it.

The worst part of an eminent man's conversation is, nine times out of ten, to be found in that part by which he means to be clever.

One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.