Intelligence famous quotes
05-13-2025
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I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.
-- Abigail Adams -
It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.
-- Agnes Repplier -
Apparently, an undocumented side effect of dope is a gross overestimation of one's own intelligence. Dopers become convinced they've hidden their stash so well a cop won't find it. They're always wrong.
-- Alafair Burke -
Success comes more quickly to the entrepreneur that follows his instincts rather than following the progress of his competitors.
-- Alan Sugar -
The temptation shared by all forms of intelligence: cynicism.
-- Albert Camus -
Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.
-- Albert Camus -
The brain is not an organ to be relied upon.
-- Alexander Blok -
I prefer the wicked rather than the foolish. The wicked sometimes rest.
-- Alexandre Dumas -
Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.
-- Alfie Kohn -
The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.
-- Alice James -
He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.
-- Andrew Carnegie -
It would never do for me to lose my wits in the presence of a man who had none too many of his own.
-- Anna Katharine Green -
A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
-- Anthony Burgess -
There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man.
-- Aristotle -
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
It is the fashion to style the present moment an extraordinary crisis.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
The profound thinker always suspects that he is superficial.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
-- Bertrand Russell -
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.
-- Bertrand Russell -
I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.
-- Bertrand Russell -
If you think your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based upon faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting or distorting the minds of the young in what is called 'education.'
-- Bertrand Russell -
Of course not. After all, I may be wrong.
-- Bertrand Russell -
Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
-- Blaise Pascal -
Those great efforts of intellect, upon which the mind sometimes touches, are such that it cannot maintain itself there. It only leaps to them, not as upon a throne, forever, but merely for an instant.
-- Blaise Pascal -
Reason commands us far more imperiously than a master; for in disobeying the one we are unfortunate, and in disobeying the other we are fools.
-- Blaise Pascal -
A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.
-- Brander Matthews -
It is better to have a fair intellect that is well used than a powerful one that is idle.
-- Bryant H. McGill -
For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.
-- Carl Sagan -
The greatest cunning is to have none at all.
-- Carl Sandburg -
The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.
-- Carlos Fuentes -
Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
-- Chapman Cohen -
It is only the constant exertion and working of our sensitive, intellectual, moral, and physical machinery that keeps us from rusting, and so becoming useless.
-- Charles Simmons -
In the scale of life there is a gradual decline in physical variability, as the organism has gathered into itself resources for meeting the exigencies of changing external conditions; and that while in the mindless and motionless plant these resources are at a minimum, their maximum is reached in the mind of man, which, at length, rises to a level with the total order and powers of nature, and in its scientific comprehension of nature is a summary, an epitome of the world.
-- Chauncey Wright -
Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.
-- Chris French -
It's incredible how much intelligence is used in this world to prove nonsense.
-- Christian Friedrich Hebbel -
Stupidity is infinitely more fascinating that intelligence. Intelligence has its limits while stupidity has none.
-- Claude Chabrol -
We all have our little illusions about our own mental abilities.
-- Cornelia Otis Skinner -
Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy.
-- Dan Barker -
You can say any fool thing to a dog and the dog will just give you this look that says, 'My GOSH, you're RIGHT! I NEVER would've thought of that!
-- Dave Barry -
There's a heart beneath the ***** and a brain beneath the wig.
-- Dolly Parton -
Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.
-- Edgar Allan Poe -
There is no such thing as Intelligence; one has intelligence of this or that. One must have intelligence only for what one is doing.
-- Edgar Degas -
There is the silence of age, too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it in words intelligible to those who have not lived the great range of life.
-- Edgar Lee Masters -
An intelligent class can scarce ever be, as a class, vicious, and never, as a class, indolent. The excited mental activity operates as a counterpoise to the stimulus of sense and appetite.
-- Edward Everett Hale -
The education of the intellect is a great business; but an unconsecd intellect is the saddest sight on which the sun looks down.
-- Edwin Chadwick -
Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.
-- Eric Temple Bell -
Unintelligent people always look for a scapegoat.
-- Ernest Bevin -
The higher the voice the smaller the intellect.
-- Ernest Newman -
We pay a high price for intelligence. Wisdom hurts.
-- Euripides -
The first mark of intelligence, to be sure, is not to start things; the second mark of intelligence is to pursue to the end what you have started.
-- Franklin Edgerton -
Every true genius is bound to be naive.
-- Friedrich Schiller -
Perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything.
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky -
It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
-- George Bernard Shaw -
When a man has been intemperate so long that shame no longer paints a blush upon his cheek, his liquor generally does it instead.
-- George D. Prentice -
It is not true that a man's intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point.
-- George Eliot -
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
-- George Orwell -
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
-- George Orwell -
When you fool a fool you strike a blow for intelligence.
-- Giacomo Casanova -
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton -
It's a terrible shame if you're born the brightest guy in your class. If you're not, then you have to hustle-and that's good.
-- Harold Prince -
Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.
-- Henri Bergson -
In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely urging the manufacture.
-- Henri Bergson -
Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
-- Henri Frederic Amiel -
Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.
-- Henri Frederic Amiel -
It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
-- Henry David Thoreau -
Business and action strengthen the brain, but too much study weakens it.
-- Henry George Bohn -
It is never for their wisdom that one loves the wisest.
-- Hester Lynch Piozzi -
Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.
-- Immanuel Kant -
Although intelligence tests are usually speed tests for the sake of convenience, it is debatable whether speed has any rightful place in the basic concept of intelligence.
-- Isabel Briggs Myers -
Intelligence is derived from two words
-- J. Martin Klotsche -
Women never use their intelligence, except when they need to prop up their intuition.
-- Jacques Deval -
A girl's brain is mysterious, but only in a superficial way-a way very exasperating to me.
-- James Agee -
If knowledge is power and power corrupt, does knowledge corrupt?
-- James Moore -
People who are smart get into Mensa. People who are really smart look around and leave.
-- James Randi -
I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring.
-- James Whistler -
Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers.
-- Janis Joplin -
No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other.
-- Jascha Heifetz -
We are sitting on a cornucopia of knowing that we had no way to access as a democracy. We couldn't get the democratization of the human capacity before our time.
-- Jean Houston -
Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do.
-- Jean Piaget -
The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
-- Jiddu Krishnamurti -
Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -
If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -
All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -
You can't be a smart cookie if you have a crummy attitude.
-- John C. Maxwell -
I love the United States, but I see here everything is measured by success, by how much money it makes, not the satisfaction to the individual.
-- John F. Akers -
If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.
-- John F. Kennedy -
The scholar is early acquainted with every department of the impossible.
-- John Ruskin -
Good sense is at the bottom of everything: virtue, genius, wit, talent and taste.
-- Joseph Chenier -
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.
-- Joseph Conrad -
The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.
-- Joseph Joubert -
No one is mediocre who has good sense and good sentiments.
-- Joseph Joubert -
Science has always promised two things not necessarily related; an increase first in our powers, second in our happiness or wisdom, and we have come to realize that it is the first and less important of the two promises which it has kept most abundantly.
-- Joseph Wood Krutch
