35 Top Cunning Quotes On Selfish People And Their Deceptions

Cunning is the art of concealing our defects and discovering other people’s weaknesses.
– William Hazlitt

Be neither silly, nor cunning, but wise.
– Benjamin Franklin

Cunning differs from wisdom as twilight from open day.
– Samuel Johnson

Cunning is the mere ape of wisdom, and all hate its low tricks.
– John Thornton

The very cunning conceal their cunning; the indifferently shrewd boast of it.
– Christian Nestell Bovee

The greatest cunning is to have none at all.
– Carl Sandburg

It is important to realize that the cunning are not always vicious. The cunning often do good things, but for self-interested and utility-driven reasons.
– Jeffrey Cornwall

Cunning is the dwarf of wisdom.
– W.R Alger

The more cunning a man is, the less he suspects that he will be caught in a simple thing. The more cunning a man is, the simpler the trap he must be caught in.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people’s weaknesses.
– William Hazlitt

Cunning leads to knavery. It is but a step from one to the other, and that very slippery. Only lying makes the difference; add that to cunning, and it is knavery.
– Ovid

Cunning is a short blanket, if you pull it over your face, you expose your feet.
– Austin O’Malley

The cunning man steals a horse, the wise man lets him alone.
– Benjamin Franklin

Cunning is seeing a hundred yards ahead—wisdom, fifty miles in advance.
– Charles William Day

One must be cunning and wicked in this world.
– Leo Tolstoy

Cunning grows in deceit at seeing itself discovered, and tries to deceive with truth itself.
– Balthasar Gracian

Learn well how to think right and then be your own shepherd, otherwise you shall be the unlucky sheep of all sorts of cunning shepherds!
– Mehmet Murat ildan

Do not be held a cheat, even though it is impossible to live today without being one. Let your greatest cunning lie in covering up what looks like cunning.
– Baltasar Gracian

There is nothing so cunning as tangled deception. If you wish to seek out the truth, first uncover the lies that surround the illusion.
– Virginia Alison

Have courage, or cunning, when you deal with an enemy.
– Publilius Syrus

Only the cunning needs excuses.
– Aristotle

The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
– William Blake

Cunning is strength withheld.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest cunning is to have none at all.
– French Proverb

Self-love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world.
– Francois de la Rochefoucauld

Cunning is but the low mimic of wisdom.
– Plato

A cunning man overreaches no one half as much as himself.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Cunning is the intensest rendering of vulgarity, absolute and utter.
– Ruskin

Cunning is none of the best nor worst qualities. It floats between virtue and vice.
– La Bruyère

Cunning has little honor.
– Danish Proverb

Cunning surpasses strength.
– German Proverb