Motivational Quotes

Intelligence and intellectuals

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Intelligence and intellectuals Motivational Quotes

Best Quotes about Intelligence and intellectuals

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

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

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

Chomsky, Noam

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

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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

Sontag, Susan

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

Randi, James

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

10.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Einstein, Albert

11.

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

12.

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

13.

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

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

Lowell, James Russell

15.

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

Weil, Simone

16.

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

Pound, Ezra

17.

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

Proverb, French

18.

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

Fatmi, Haneef

19.

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

20.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

21.

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

22.

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

Ade, George

23.

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

Al-Nuri

24.

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

Wilson, Robert

25.

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

26.

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

Huxley, Aldous

27.

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

Wordsworth, Elizabeth

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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.

31.

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

Havel, Vaclav

32.

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

33.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

34.

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

35.

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

36.

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

Bankhead, Tallulah

37.

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

Einstein, Albert

38.

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Proverb, Jewish

40.

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.

41.

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

Short, Solomon

42.

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.

43.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

44.

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

45.

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Fasold, David

46.

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

47.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Weil, Simone

48.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

49.

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

50.

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

Hawking, Stephen