Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

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

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

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

Fromm, Erich

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

Sontag, Susan

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

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

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

Hawking, Stephen

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

10.

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

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

Huxley, Aldous

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Weil, Simone

17.

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

Havel, Vaclav

18.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

20.

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

Al-Nuri

21.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

22.

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

Einstein, Albert

23.

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

Lowell, James Russell

24.

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

Chomsky, Noam

25.

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

Randi, James

26.

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

27.

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.

28.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

29.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

30.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

31.

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

32.

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

Weil, Simone

33.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

34.

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

Russell, Bertrand

35.

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

Bankhead, Tallulah

36.

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.

37.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

38.

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

39.

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

Ade, George

40.

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

41.

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

Fatmi, Haneef

42.

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.

43.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

44.

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

Pound, Ezra

45.

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

46.

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

Herbert, A. P.

47.

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

Lec, Stanislaw J.

48.

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

Cavett, Dick

49.

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

Proverb, Jewish

50.

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.