Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

- Havel, Vaclav

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

Machiavelli, Niccolo

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

Ade, George

The level of the development of a country is determined, in considerable part, by the level of development of its people's intelligence.

Machado, Luis Albert

Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.

Proust, Marcel

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.

Russell, Bertrand

To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.

Bronowski, Jacob

A highbrow is the kind of person who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso.

Herbert, A. P.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

The role of the intelligence --that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.

Weil, Simone

10.

Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven.

Bono, Edward De

11.

To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.

Auden, W. H.

12.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.

Hellman, Lillian

13.

The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.

Bogan, Louise

14.

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Fasold, David

15.

There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.

Woolf, Virginia

16.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Einstein, Albert

17.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Weil, Simone

18.

Ask a wise man to dinner and he'll upset everyone by his gloomy silence or tiresome questions. Invite him to a dance and you'll have a camel prancing about. Haul him off to a public entertainment and his face will be enough to spoil the people's entertainment.

Erasmus, Desiderius

19.

The good are so harsh to the clever, the clever so rude to the good!

Wordsworth, Elizabeth

20.

If intellection and knowledge were mere passion from without, or the bare reception of extraneous and adventitious forms, then no reason could be given at all why a mirror or looking-glass should not understand; whereas it cannot so much as sensibly perceive those images which it receives and reflects to us.

Cudworth, Ralph J.

21.

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

Fromm, Erich

22.

Half of being smart is knowing what you are dumb about.

Short, Solomon

23.

The woman who thinks she is intelligent demands equal rights with men. A woman who is intelligent does not.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

24.

People who are smart get into Mensa. People who are really smart look around and leave.

Randi, James

25.

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

The true knowledge or science which exists nowhere but in the mind itself, has no other entity at all besides intelligibility; and therefore whatsoever is clearly intelligible, is absolutely true.

Cudworth, Ralph J.

28.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

29.

We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.

Thoreau, Henry David

30.

The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.

Pound, Ezra

31.

People generally treat me like I'm very intelligent and really, I'm much less intelligent than she is. Scully is insanely intelligent.

Anderson, Gillian

32.

You think you are clever until you find out how smart you are

33.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Sontag, Susan

34.

It's easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

35.

It's good to be clever, but not to show it.

Proverb, French

36.

The intellect is weak; it has no power except over what is as weak as itself.

Al-Nuri

37.

The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure.

Peter, Laurence J.

38.

When you don't have an education, you've got to use your brains.

39.

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.

Chomsky, Noam

41.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

Orwell, George

42.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

Whitehead, Alfred North

43.

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

Havel, Vaclav

44.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt

45.

Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the higher life.

Huxley, Aldous

46.

Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

47.

You don't need intelligence to have luck, but you do need luck to have intelligence.

Proverb, Jewish

48.

The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.

Pound, Ezra

49.

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.