Quotes About Intelligence

Ce qui caractérise notre époque, c'est la crainte d'avoir l'air bête en décernant une louange, et la certitude d'avoir l'air intelligent en décernant un blâme. »

Just bring your wits. Sometimes that's the most effective weapon any of us has.

Learning is borrowed knowledge; genius is knowledge innate.

Thus arises the solution proposed by the so-called Gestalt psychology: behaviour involves a total field embracing subject and objects, and the dynamics of this field constitutes feeling (Lewin), while its structure depends on perception, effector-functions, and intelligence.

For some writers mental phenomena become intelligible only when related to the organism. This view is of course inescapable when we study the elementary functions (perception, motor functions, etc.) in which intelligence originates. But we can hardly see neurology explaining why 2 and 2 make 4, or why the laws of deduction are forced on the mind of necessity.

I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.

Nuclear, ecological, chemical, economic — our arsenal of Death by Stupidity is impressive for a species as smart as Homo sapiens [Strange New World, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/boo... ].

If one divided all of human science into two parts - the one common to all men, the other particular to the learned - the latter would be quite small in comparison with the former. But we are hardly aware of what is generally attained, because it is attained without thought and even before the age of reason; because, moreover, learning is noticed only by its differences, and as in algebraic equations, common quantities count for nothing.

an animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?

The good man can be proud of his virtue because it is his. But of what is the intelligent man proud?

IN order to discover the rules of society best suited to nations, a superior intelligence beholding all the passions of men without experiencing any of them would be needed.

To exist is to feel; our feeling is undoubtedly earlier than our intelligence, and we had feelings before we had ideas.

In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated.

Ses progrès dans la géométrie vous pourraient servir d'épreuve et de mesure certaine pour le développement de son intelligence : mais sitôt qu'il peut discerner ce qui est utile et ce qui ne l'est pas, il importe d'user de beaucoup de ménagement et d'art pour l'amener aux études spéculatives.

This very fact that crowds possess in common ordinary qualities explains why they can never accomplish acts demanding a high degree of intelligence. The decisions affecting matters of general interest come to by an assembly of men of distinction, but specialists in different walks of life, are not sensibly superior to the decisions that would be adopted by a gathering of imbeciles.

Since everything that comes into the human mind enters through the gates of sense, man's first reason is a reason of sense-experience. It is this that serves as a foundation for the reason of the intelligence; our first teachers in natural philosophy are our feet, hands, and eyes. To substitute books for them does not teach us to reason, it teaches us to use the reason of others rather than our own; it teaches us to believe much and know little.

Don't you make fun of me or my children! Some babies are premature. Mine were all postmature. That's why they're so smart. Their brains had longer to develop.

Ice-T was just a pleasure to work with. He was a smart gentleman.

Take away the ability of an intelligent, principled, hard-working mind to get it wrong, and you take away the whole thing.

Work as smart as you are able.

Give me a man with a good allowance of nose,... when I want any good head-work done I choose a man - provided his education has been suitable - with a long nose.

There is no human feeling to the US securities markets and sometimes no discernible evidence of human intelligence either. But they work.

Most people can tire of a lecture in fifteen minutes, clever people can do it in five, and sensible people don't go to lectures at all.

Any work is creative work if done by a thinking mind.