104 quotes about Intelligence and Intellectuals



She was short on intellect, but long on shape.
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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.
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I've never been an intellectual but I have this look.
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The intellect is weak; it has no power except over what is as weak as itself.
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Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.
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People generally treat me like I'm very intelligent and really, I'm much less intelligent than she is. Scully is insanely intelligent.
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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.
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God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.
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I've been called many things, but never an intellectual.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.
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To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.
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A person of intellect without energy added to it, is a failure.
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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.
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A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.
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The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.
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It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
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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.
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The woman who thinks she is intelligent demands equal rights with men. A woman who is intelligent does not.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.
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We should take care not to make the intellect our god: it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
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The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
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Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.
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An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.
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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.
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Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.
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A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.
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If a man's eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.
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One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.
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We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.
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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.
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Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.
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Intelligence is that faculty of mind, by which order is perceived in a situation previously considered disordered.
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I was street smart, but unfortunately the street was Rodeo Drive.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.
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Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.
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And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, that one small head could carry all he knew.
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He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.
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There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.
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It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.
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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.
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A highbrow is the kind of person who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso.
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There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.
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Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.
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Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, But quickly to see how to make them good.
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Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.
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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.
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Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.
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I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
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It's easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.
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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.
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Intelligence, in diapers, is invisible. And when it matures, out the window it flies. We have to pounce on it earlier.
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Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost.
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A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere.
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It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence.
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The level of the development of a country is determined, in considerable part, by the level of development of its people's intelligence.
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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.
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The sign of an intelligent people is their ability to control emotions by the application of reason.
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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.
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A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.
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The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
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The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure.
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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.
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The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.
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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.
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It's good to be clever, but not to show it.
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You don't need intelligence to have luck, but you do need luck to have intelligence.
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People who are smart get into Mensa. People who are really smart look around and leave.
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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.
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The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.
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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.
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The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
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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.
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