Quotes About Intelligence

It is only the ignorant who despise education.

A god could hardly love and be wise.

A fool is known by his speech, and a wise man by silence.

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

He whose wisdom cannot help him, gets no good from being wise.

Impatience makes fools of clever men...

You cannot say, "I will look it up." Your birthday and social security number are things you look up; trigonometric functions and identities are what you know all the time.

There is a sacred science, and for thousands of years countless inquisitive people have sought in vain to penetrate its "secrets." It is as if they attempted to dig a hole in the sea with an ax. The tool must be of the same nature as the objective to be worked upon. Spirit is found only with spirit, and esoterism is the spiritual aspect of the world, inaccessible to cerebral intelligence. Those who profess to reveal the esoterism of such teachings are charlatans.

To develop one's individuality is to live the egoistical life of the passions, to make oneself the centre of everything, and end finally by being the slave of a thousand passing goods which bring us a wretched momentary joy. Personality, on the contrary, increases as the soul rises above the sensible world and by intelligence and will binds itself more closely to what makes the life of the spirit.

It is difficult to predict the future of an economy in which it takes more brains to figure out the tax on our income than it does to earn it.

Of course I received various permutations of the "Who will want to marry you if you read so much?" lecture, but I also had to endure the chilly "Don't try to be so different from normal people." Different from normal people? When I first heard that, I was sorely offended. I thought every person should live for art, not just me, and furthermore, why would I want to be normal? Why would I want to be stupid like everyone else?

I read books—read, read, one can learn everything from books.

I'm not stupid, romantic, or a busy Russian novelist.

But I quickly came to see, she said, that in fact there was nothing worse than to be an average white male of average talents and intelligence: even the most oppressed housewife, she said, is closer to the drama and poetry of life than he is, because as Louise Bourgeois shows us she is capable at least of holding more than one perspective.

so for most people the act of reading symbolised intelligence, quite possibly because in that formative time they had not enjoyed or understood the books that they were obliged to read.

More than anything,' he said, 'people dislike being made to feel stupid, and if you arouse those feelings, you do so at your own cost.

Joe certainly didn't seem concerned with his own enlightenment, but he did seem more intelligent than the average muscle neck. Then he raised his arm, bent his head, and sniffed his pit. Gabrielle looked at the plates in her hands. She should have used paper.

It is quite possible for the vulgar to be funny, but to succeed, it must rise to a certain genius.

It's a lovely thing to see intelligent argument, unbending principle and policy go up against demagoguery, nativism and vulgar name-calling.

I like characters who have two different things going on, whether it is Robin from 'Top Of The Lake' having that strength juxtaposed with the vulnerability and being in pain, or whether it is Peggy from 'Mad Men' with her naivety and her sort of idiocy at times, combined with her intelligence and courage really to do what she did at that time.

The NSA has the greatest surveillance capabilities in American history... The real problem is that they're using these capabilities to make us vulnerable.

Most women say 'Please speak to me from the waist up: my brain, my eyes.'

Babies have millions of brain cells. They are like light bulbs waiting to be turned on. Don't wait for them to go to school and hope for the best.

Robots will someday, or maybe, wake up. They may be really smart. They may be as creative, smart and capable as human beings, and fully conscious, and self discerning with free will.