Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

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

- Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

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

Short, Solomon

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

Proverb, Jewish

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.

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

How easy would life be if you were less intelligent!

Kocher, Gerhard

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

Allen, Woody

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

Wordsworth, Elizabeth

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

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

10.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

11.

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

Proverb, French

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Fasold, David

16.

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.

17.

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

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

19.

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

Pound, Ezra

20.

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

Sontag, Susan

21.

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

Lowell, James Russell

22.

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

Hawking, Stephen

23.

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

Wilson, Robert

24.

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

25.

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

Einstein, Albert

26.

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

Fisher, Carrie

27.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

28.

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

Chomsky, Noam

29.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

30.

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

Herbert, A. P.

31.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

32.

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

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.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

35.

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

36.

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

Ade, George

37.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

38.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

39.

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