Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

- Guin, Ursula K. Le

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

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.

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

Bronowski, Jacob

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Sontag, Susan

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

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

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

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

Proverb, Jewish

10.

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

11.

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

Chomsky, Noam

12.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Pound, Ezra

18.

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

20.

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

Fisher, Carrie

21.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

22.

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

23.

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

Wright, Frank Lloyd

24.

How easy would life be if you were less intelligent!

Kocher, Gerhard

25.

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

Thomas, Dylan

26.

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

Allen, Woody

27.

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

28.

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

29.

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

30.

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

31.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Einstein, Albert

32.

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

33.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Weil, Simone

34.

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

35.

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

Hawking, Stephen

36.

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

37.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

38.

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.

39.

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

Einstein, Albert

40.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

41.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

42.

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

Randi, James

43.

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

44.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

45.

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

46.

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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

48.

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

Ade, George

49.

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

Short, Solomon

50.

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

Herbert, A. P.