Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

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.

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

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

Russell, Bertrand

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

Wright, Frank Lloyd

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

Fisher, Carrie

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

How easy would life be if you were less intelligent!

Kocher, Gerhard

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

Weil, Simone

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.

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

Proverb, Jewish

10.

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

Chomsky, Noam

11.

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

12.

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

Wordsworth, Elizabeth

13.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

17.

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

18.

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

Al-Nuri

19.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

20.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

21.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

22.

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

Lowell, James Russell

23.

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.

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.

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

Short, Solomon

26.

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

27.

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

Pound, Ezra

28.

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

30.

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

31.

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

Havel, Vaclav

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

Hawking, Stephen

36.

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

38.

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

Lec, Stanislaw J.

39.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Weil, Simone

40.

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

Ade, George

41.

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

42.

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Fasold, David

43.

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

Huxley, Aldous

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Bronowski, Jacob

50.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De