Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

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

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

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

Proverb, French

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.

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.

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

Einstein, Albert

Machiavelli, Niccolo

A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.

Matthews, Brander

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

Al-Nuri

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

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

Fatmi, Haneef

10.

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

11.

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.

Russell, Bertrand

15.

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

Ade, George

16.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

17.

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

Allen, Woody

18.

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

19.

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

Thomas, Dylan

20.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

21.

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

Wright, Frank Lloyd

22.

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

Cavett, Dick

23.

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

Bronowski, Jacob

24.

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

25.

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Fasold, David

26.

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

27.

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

Weil, Simone

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

31.

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

Randi, James

32.

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

Short, Solomon

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.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

35.

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

36.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Weil, Simone

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 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

39.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

40.

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

41.

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

Sontag, Susan

42.

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