Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

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

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

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

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

Cavett, Dick

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

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

Lewis, Wyndham

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

Randi, James

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

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

Fatmi, Haneef

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

Einstein, Albert

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

Proverb, French

10.

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

Al-Nuri

11.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

12.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

13.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Weil, Simone

14.

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

15.

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

Fisher, Carrie

16.

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

Weil, Simone

17.

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

18.

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

Bankhead, Tallulah

19.

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

Hawking, Stephen

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

Wilson, Robert

23.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

24.

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

25.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

26.

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

27.

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

28.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

We should take care not to make the intellect our god: it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

Einstein, Albert

32.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

33.

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

Short, Solomon

34.

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

Huxley, Aldous

35.

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

Pound, Ezra

36.

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

Chomsky, Noam

37.

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

38.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

39.

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence.

Lowell, James Russell

41.

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

Herbert, A. P.

42.

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Fasold, David

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Intelligence, in diapers, is invisible. And when it matures, out the window it flies. We have to pounce on it earlier.

Lec, Stanislaw J.

46.

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.

47.

And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, that one small head could carry all he knew.

Goldsmith, Oliver

48.

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

Proverb, Jewish

49.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

50.

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