Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

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

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

How easy would life be if you were less intelligent!

Kocher, Gerhard

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

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

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.

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.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

Cavett, Dick

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.

10.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

11.

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

12.

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

Fisher, Carrie

13.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

14.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

15.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

16.

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

Ade, George

17.

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

18.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Einstein, Albert

19.

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

Bronowski, Jacob

20.

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.

21.

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

Kundera, Milan

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Proverb, French

26.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

27.

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

28.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

29.

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

30.

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

Russell, Bertrand

31.

A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.

Matthews, Brander

32.

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

Herbert, A. P.

33.

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

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.

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

Al-Nuri

36.

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

Einstein, Albert

37.

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

Wright, Frank Lloyd

38.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

39.

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

Short, Solomon

40.

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

Huxley, Aldous

41.

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

Wilson, Robert

42.

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

Bankhead, Tallulah

43.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Weil, Simone

44.

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

45.

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

Proverb, Jewish

46.

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

Pound, Ezra

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Lowell, James Russell

50.

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Fasold, David