To Confound The Wise

I have been reading The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho and have come across a quite enigmatic passage. The bank manager who having recently been influenced by Athena is giving a presentation at a meeting and starts his dissertation with the words of St. Paul:

God hid the most important things from the wise because they cannot understand what is simple.

Evidently this doesn't appear exactly like this in the Bible, it could be one of two passages:

Matthew 11:25: I thank thee, O Father, thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.

or from St. Paul:

1 Corinthians 1:27 But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.

Well, I've always found the Bible to be a bit on the obscure side to say the least. In fact I've often found such writings as "The Secret of The Golden Flower" or even "The Taoist Yoga of Immortality" to be easier to understand....(perhaps I'm being confounded)... :) For me the bank manager's misquote seems clearer.

All the quotes speak to me of a secret knowledge, not secret insomuch that it is not told or given, but, secret in its nature as something that is so simple that the wise do not understand it yet someone with the innocence of a babe can. There are similar references in the Tao Te Ching and Sufi texts teem with references to Higher Knowledge that is beyond the learned and intellectual.

The mind loves the complex, it has this ability to take something that's been attempted to be expressed simply and add so many layers and twists that it gets buried under intellectual dissection. A child, however, has no problem with the question of what the sound of one hand clapping is.

Anyway, I would be truly interested in what others think of the above quotes and their understanding of what they mean.