Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

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

- Proverb, French

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

How easy would life be if you were less intelligent!

Kocher, Gerhard

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

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

Allen, Woody

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

Lec, Stanislaw J.

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

Hawking, Stephen

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

Herbert, A. P.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Fasold, David

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

10.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

11.

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

Pound, Ezra

12.

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

Bronowski, Jacob

13.

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

Ade, George

14.

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

Short, Solomon

15.

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

Proverb, French

16.

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

17.

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

Chomsky, Noam

18.

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.

19.

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

Randi, James

20.

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

Thomas, Dylan

21.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

22.

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

Fatmi, Haneef

23.

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

24.

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

Havel, Vaclav

25.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

Lewis, Wyndham

29.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

30.

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

31.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

32.

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

Wright, Frank Lloyd

33.

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

Sontag, Susan

34.

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

35.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

36.

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

37.

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Kundera, Milan

39.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

40.

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

41.

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

Proverb, Jewish

43.

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

44.

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

Bankhead, Tallulah

45.

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

Lowell, James Russell

46.

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.

47.

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.

48.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

49.

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

50.

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