Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

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.

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

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

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

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Einstein, Albert

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

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

Huxley, Aldous

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

Einstein, Albert

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

Ade, George

10.

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

Randi, James

11.

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

12.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

13.

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

Herbert, A. P.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Cavett, Dick

17.

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

18.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

19.

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

20.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

21.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

22.

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

Lewis, Wyndham

23.

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.

24.

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

Hawking, Stephen

25.

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

Wilson, Robert

26.

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

Kundera, Milan

27.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

28.

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

Sontag, Susan

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

32.

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

Wright, Frank Lloyd

33.

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

Al-Nuri

34.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

Thomas, Dylan

35.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

36.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

37.

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

38.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

39.

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

Fisher, Carrie

40.

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

41.

I've been called many things, but never an intellectual.

Bankhead, Tallulah

42.

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

43.

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

Wordsworth, Elizabeth

44.

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.

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

I've never been an intellectual but I have this look.

Allen, Woody

49.

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

50.

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.