Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

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

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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.

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

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

Sontag, Susan

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

Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.

Colby, Frank Moore

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

Chomsky, Noam

10.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

11.

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.

12.

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Einstein, Albert

14.

Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.

Huxley, Aldous

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

18.

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.

19.

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

Short, Solomon

20.

I was street smart, but unfortunately the street was Rodeo Drive.

Fisher, Carrie

21.

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

22.

If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed.

Reade, W. Winwood

23.

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

Hawking, Stephen

24.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

25.

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

Al-Nuri

26.

Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.

Dworkin, Andrea

27.

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

Proverb, Jewish

29.

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

30.

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

Proverb, French

31.

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

Havel, Vaclav

32.

I hate intellectuals. They are from the top down. I am from the bottom up.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

33.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

Lawrence, D. H.

34.

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

Marx, Karl

35.

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

36.

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

Kundera, Milan

37.

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

Pound, Ezra

38.

Intelligence is that faculty of mind, by which order is perceived in a situation previously considered disordered.

Fatmi, Haneef

39.

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

40.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

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

Randi, James

42.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

43.

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