A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

We searched Einstein's documented corpus for this line — his books including *The World As I See It*, his published correspondence, lecture transcripts, and major lifetime interviews — and consulted the standard scholarly reference, *The Ultimate Quotable Einstein* (Alice Calaprice, ed., Princeton University Press), which carefully sorts genuine, attributed, and misattributed lines; this aphorism appears in none of them. The phrase circulates heavily online and in compilation volumes such as *400+ Quotes by Albert Einstein* (Mocktime Publication) and *Motivating Thoughts of Einstein* (Mahesh Dutt Sharma, 2021), but these are undocumented aggregations that supply no citation. Tellingly, *The Essential Book of Business and Life Quotations* (2023) lists the line as "Unknown; Attributed without evidence to Albert Einstein," and another book credits nearly identical words to Malcolm X, which shows only loose, uncertain circulation rather than a credible rival author. One research pass pointed to Thomas Szasz via a Quote Investigator discussion, but on review that connection concerns a different Szasz saying about forgiving and forgetting, not this "clever solves / wise avoids" wording, so it does not establish a competing origin for this exact line. We could not identify any specific, dated earlier source or named alternative author who demonstrably wrote these words first, which our policy requires before a finding of misattribution — mere absence of an Einstein source is not enough. Widely credited to Einstein but unsupported by any primary source and lacking a citable competing origin, this quote is attributed.