Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

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

- Wordsworth, Elizabeth

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

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

Thomas, Dylan

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Bronowski, Jacob

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

Lec, Stanislaw J.

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

A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.

Matthews, Brander

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

Pound, Ezra

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

Short, Solomon

10.

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

11.

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

Wilson, Robert

12.

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

Proverb, French

13.

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

Weil, Simone

14.

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

Cavett, Dick

15.

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

16.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Weil, Simone

17.

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

Hawking, Stephen

18.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

19.

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

Lewis, Wyndham

20.

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

21.

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

How easy would life be if you were less intelligent!

Kocher, Gerhard

23.

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

Allen, Woody

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

Wordsworth, Elizabeth

28.

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.

29.

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

Havel, Vaclav

30.

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

Bankhead, Tallulah

31.

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

32.

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

Proverb, Jewish

33.

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

Huxley, Aldous

34.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

35.

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.

36.

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

Chomsky, Noam

37.

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

38.

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

39.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Einstein, Albert

40.

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

Randi, James

41.

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

Fisher, Carrie

42.

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

43.

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

44.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

48.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

49.

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

50.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North