Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

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

- Al-Nuri

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

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

Pound, Ezra

How easy would life be if you were less intelligent!

Kocher, Gerhard

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

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

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

Short, Solomon

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

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

Weil, Simone

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

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Einstein, Albert

10.

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

Proverb, French

11.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

15.

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

Wordsworth, Elizabeth

16.

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

Lowell, James Russell

17.

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

18.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

19.

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.

20.

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

Randi, James

21.

A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.

Matthews, Brander

22.

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

23.

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

Proverb, Jewish

24.

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

Wright, Frank Lloyd

25.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

26.

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

Havel, Vaclav

27.

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Huxley, Aldous

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Thomas, Dylan

35.

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Fasold, David

36.

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

37.

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Einstein, Albert

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Bronowski, Jacob

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

Allen, Woody

48.

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

49.

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

50.

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Guin, Ursula K. Le