104 quotes about Intelligence and Intellectuals

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

Ade, George

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

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

Allen, Woody

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

Al-Nuri

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

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

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.

God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.

Bacon, Francis

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

Bankhead, Tallulah

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

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

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

Bradbury, Ray

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

Bronowski, Jacob

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

Cavett, Dick

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

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.

A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Chomsky, Noam

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

Clarke, Arthur C.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

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.

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.

Intellectual sodomy, which comes from the refusal to be simple about plain matters, is as gross and abundant today as sexual perversion and they are nowise different from one another.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

Einstein, Albert

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Einstein, Albert

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

Einstein, Albert

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

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

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

If a man's eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Fasold, David

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

Fatmi, Haneef

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

Fisher, Carrie

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

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 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.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

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

Havel, Vaclav

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

Hawking, Stephen

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

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

Herbert, A. P.

There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.

Herold, Don

Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.

Hope, Anthony

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Huxley, Aldous

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

Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.

Keynes, John Maynard

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

Kundera, Milan

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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.

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

Lec, Stanislaw J.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

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

Lewis, Wyndham

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

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

The sign of an intelligent people is their ability to control emotions by the application of reason.

Mannes, Marya

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

A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.

Matthews, Brander

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

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

Peter, Laurence J.

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

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

Pound, Ezra

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

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

Proverb, French

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

Proverb, Jewish

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

Randi, James

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

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

Russell, Bertrand

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

It is the mind that makes the body rich; and as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, so honor peereth in the meanest habit.

Shakespeare, William

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

Short, Solomon

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

Sontag, Susan

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

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

Thomas, Dylan

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

Thoreau, Henry David

Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence.

Tikkanen, Henrik

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

Twain, Mark

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

Unknown, Source

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Unknown, Source

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

Unknown, Source

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

Unknown, Source

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

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Weil, Simone

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

Weil, Simone

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.

Wiggam, Albert Edward

Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.

Wilde, Oscar

The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Wilson, Robert

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

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

Wordsworth, Elizabeth

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

Wright, Frank Lloyd