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

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.

Cavett, Dick

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).

Foucault, Michel

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

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.

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

Sontag, Susan

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

Thoreau, Henry David

10.

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

Randi, James

11.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

12.

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

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

Huxley, Aldous

14.

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

Chomsky, Noam

15.

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

Herbert, A. P.

16.

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

Proverb, Jewish

17.

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

18.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Kundera, Milan

22.

The difference between a smart man and a wise man is that a smart man knows what to say, a wise man knows whether or not to say it.

Garafola, Frank M.

23.

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

Wright, Frank Lloyd

24.

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

Havel, Vaclav

25.

Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, But quickly to see how to make them good.

Hubbard, Elbert

26.

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

27.

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

28.

A person of intellect without energy added to it, is a failure.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

29.

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

30.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

31.

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

32.

Intelligence: I was asked tonight why I refuse to have truck with intellectuals after business hours. But of course I won t. 1. I am not an intellectual. Two minutes talk with Aldous Huxley,William Glock,or any of the New Statesman crowd would expose me utterly. 2. I am too tired after my day's work to man the intellectual palisade. 3. When my work is finished I want to eat,drink,smoke,and relax. 4. I don't know very much,but what I do know I know better than anybody,and I don't want to argue about it. I know what I think about an actor or an actress,and am not interested in what anybody else thinks. My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

Agate, James

33.

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.

34.

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

Pound, Ezra

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Weil, Simone

40.

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

41.

A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere.

Lewis, Wyndham

42.

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

43.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

44.

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

Fisher, Carrie

45.

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

Bronowski, Jacob

46.

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

Al-Nuri

47.

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

Fatmi, Haneef

48.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Eliot, George

49.

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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

Short, Solomon