Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

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

- Short, Solomon

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

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

Lewis, Wyndham

How easy would life be if you were less intelligent!

Kocher, Gerhard

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

Randi, James

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

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.

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

Cavett, Dick

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

Einstein, Albert

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

Russell, Bertrand

Intelligence: I was asked tonight why I refuse to have truck with intellectuals after business hours. But of course I won t. 1. I am not an intellectual. Two minutes talk with Aldous Huxley,William Glock,or any of the New Statesman crowd would expose me utterly. 2. I am too tired after my day's work to man the intellectual palisade. 3. When my work is finished I want to eat,drink,smoke,and relax. 4. I don't know very much,but what I do know I know better than anybody,and I don't want to argue about it. I know what I think about an actor or an actress,and am not interested in what anybody else thinks. My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

Agate, James

10.

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

Lec, Stanislaw J.

11.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Herbert, A. P.

13.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

14.

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

15.

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

Chomsky, Noam

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

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 will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

21.

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

22.

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

Huxley, Aldous

23.

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

Hawking, Stephen

24.

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

25.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

26.

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

Pound, Ezra

27.

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

Fatmi, Haneef

28.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

29.

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

30.

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

31.

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

Lowell, James Russell

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.

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

Einstein, Albert

34.

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

Wright, Frank Lloyd

35.

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

36.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

37.

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

Proverb, Jewish

38.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

39.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

40.

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

Wordsworth, Elizabeth

41.

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

Sontag, Susan

42.

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.

43.

A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.

Matthews, Brander

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Al-Nuri

49.

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

Kundera, Milan

50.

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