Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

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

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

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

Randi, James

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

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

Weil, Simone

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.

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

Einstein, Albert

How easy would life be if you were less intelligent!

Kocher, Gerhard

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

10.

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

Russell, Bertrand

11.

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

Ade, George

12.

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

13.

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

Wordsworth, Elizabeth

14.

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

15.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

17.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

18.

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

19.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

20.

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

21.

A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.

Matthews, Brander

22.

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

Pound, Ezra

23.

When you don't have an education, you've got to use your brains.

24.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Einstein, Albert

25.

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.

26.

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Fasold, David

27.

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

28.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

29.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

30.

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

Fisher, Carrie

31.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

32.

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

33.

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

Bankhead, Tallulah

34.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

35.

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

Wright, Frank Lloyd

36.

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

37.

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

38.

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

Lowell, James Russell

39.

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

Proverb, French

40.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

41.

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

42.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

43.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

44.

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.

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.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Huxley, Aldous

49.

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

Bronowski, Jacob

50.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver