Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.

- Matthews, Brander

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

Short, Solomon

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.

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

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

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Peter, Laurence J.

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

Cavett, Dick

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

Herbert, A. P.

10.

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.

11.

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

Lowell, James Russell

12.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Weil, Simone

13.

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

Einstein, Albert

14.

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

Al-Nuri

15.

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

Hawking, Stephen

16.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

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

Sontag, Susan

22.

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

Einstein, Albert

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Pound, Ezra

34.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

35.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

36.

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

Huxley, Aldous

37.

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

Chomsky, Noam

38.

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

Wordsworth, Elizabeth

39.

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

40.

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

41.

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

42.

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

Fisher, Carrie

43.

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

Lewis, Wyndham

44.

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

Wilson, Robert

45.

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

Thomas, Dylan

46.

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

Ade, George

47.

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

Lec, Stanislaw J.

48.

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

Havel, Vaclav

49.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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