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

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

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

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

Chomsky, Noam

A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.

Matthews, Brander

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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.

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

10.

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

Einstein, Albert

11.

A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere.

Lewis, Wyndham

12.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

13.

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

Randi, James

14.

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.

15.

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

Hawking, Stephen

16.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

17.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

18.

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

Lec, Stanislaw J.

19.

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

20.

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

Fatmi, Haneef

21.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

22.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

23.

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

Wilson, Robert

24.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Einstein, Albert

25.

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

26.

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

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.

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.

30.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

31.

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

Al-Nuri

32.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

33.

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

Fisher, Carrie

34.

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

35.

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

Einstein, Albert

36.

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

Sontag, Susan

37.

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

38.

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

Cavett, Dick

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Kundera, Milan

43.

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

44.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

45.

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

46.

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

Wright, Frank Lloyd

47.

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

Wordsworth, Elizabeth

48.

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

Huxley, Aldous

49.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.