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

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

Hawking, Stephen

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

Randi, James

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

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

Huxley, Aldous

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.

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

How easy would life be if you were less intelligent!

Kocher, Gerhard

10.

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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 highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.

Matthews, Brander

13.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Einstein, Albert

14.

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

Einstein, Albert

15.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

16.

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

Allen, Woody

17.

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.

18.

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

Pound, Ezra

19.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

20.

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

Cavett, Dick

21.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

22.

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.

23.

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

Wilson, Robert

24.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

25.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

26.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

27.

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

Fatmi, Haneef

28.

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

29.

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

Kundera, Milan

30.

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

31.

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

Weil, Simone

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

37.

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

Einstein, Albert

38.

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

Al-Nuri

39.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

40.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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

Havel, Vaclav

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 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

44.

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

Herbert, A. P.

45.

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

46.

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

Lewis, Wyndham

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Weil, Simone

50.

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