Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

- Keynes, John Maynard

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

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

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

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

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

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

Lewis, Wyndham

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

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

Randi, James

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

10.

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

11.

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

Wordsworth, Elizabeth

12.

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

Sontag, Susan

13.

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

14.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Weil, Simone

15.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

16.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

17.

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

18.

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

19.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

20.

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

21.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

22.

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

23.

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

24.

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

25.

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

26.

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

Proverb, French

27.

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

Herbert, A. P.

28.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

29.

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

Pound, Ezra

30.

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

Lowell, James Russell

31.

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

Wright, Frank Lloyd

32.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Einstein, Albert

33.

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

34.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Weil, Simone

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Hawking, Stephen

41.

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.

42.

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

Bronowski, Jacob

43.

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.

44.

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Fasold, David

45.

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

Allen, Woody

46.

How easy would life be if you were less intelligent!

Kocher, Gerhard

47.

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

Al-Nuri

48.

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

Huxley, Aldous

49.

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

Fisher, Carrie

50.

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