Famous Quotes about Intelligence and Intellectuals (104 Quotations)

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

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.

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.

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

It is little that one gains by cleverness.

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