Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

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

- Wilson, Robert

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.

Hellman, Lillian

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

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

Peter, Laurence J.

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.

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

10.

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

11.

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

Wilson, Robert

12.

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

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

Proverb, French

14.

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.

15.

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

Wordsworth, Elizabeth

16.

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

Bankhead, Tallulah

17.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

18.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Weil, Simone

19.

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

20.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

21.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Einstein, Albert

22.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

23.

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

Cavett, Dick

24.

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

Bronowski, Jacob

25.

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.

26.

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.

27.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

28.

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

Herbert, A. P.

29.

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

Lewis, Wyndham

30.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

31.

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

Fisher, Carrie

32.

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

33.

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

Hawking, Stephen

34.

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

Einstein, Albert

35.

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

Einstein, Albert

36.

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

Randi, James

37.

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

Ade, George

38.

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

Sontag, Susan

39.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

40.

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

41.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Pound, Ezra

47.

A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.

Matthews, Brander

48.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

49.

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