Quotes about intelligence

page 5

“Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.”

“[…] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.”

“Reason is intelligence taking exercise; imagination is intelligence with an erection.”

“A woman of many talents. And intelligent, too. He'd probably have to kill her soon.”

“Fashion does not have to prove that it is serious. It is the proof that intelligent frivolity can be something creative and positive”

“Let's sum up: an unknown number of enemies with unknown capabilities, supported by a gang of madmen, packs of attack animals, and superhumanly intelligent pocket change.”

“Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.”

“To be or not to be?' That is not the question. What is the question? The question is not one of being, but of becoming. 'To become more or not to become more' This is the question faced by each intelligence in our universe.”

“I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.”

“We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.”

“Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a single conception of ability. At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence.”

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

“So I left my wonderfully intelligent family and soaked myself in the bath and considered drowning myself. Then I remembered I still had chocolate cake left over from yesterday so I came back up for air. Some things are worth living for.”

“The weak are dominated by their ego, the wise dominate their ego, and the intelligent are in a constant struggle against their ego”

“I like on the table,
when we're speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.”

“The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.”

“No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties.”

“People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.”

“Then I reminded myself that all intelligent children suffer bad dreams.”

“As more people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers.”

“Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.”

“A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.”

“Intelligence is not the ability to store information, but to know where to find it.”

“The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.”

“Readers understand that the books celebrate female power. In the romance novel, the woman always wins. With courage, intelligence and gentleness she brings the most dangerous creature on the earth, the human male, to his knees.”

“We all make mistakes, but intelligence enables us to do it on purpose.”

“belief is the death of intelligence.”

“I like the cover," he said. "Don't Panic. It's the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody's said to me all day.”

“Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.”

“Ravens are the birds I'll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.”

“Cats are cats… the world over!
These intelligent, peace-loving, four-footed friends- who are without prejudice, without hate, without greed- may someday teach us something.
-James Mackintosh Qwilleran”

“To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you; nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a "Natural Man."”

“Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.”

“My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before — a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.”

“Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence.
Or insanity.”

“Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.”

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”

“She was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence… they don't talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good…”

“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right…The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.”

“People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about "these days," imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "these days" and that human nature changes with the times.”

“Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.”

“We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate.”

“There's nothing sexier in a man than intelligence.”

“All right, the pendulum isn’t working. Sometimes you need an accelerant to help it.” – Death
“Like gasoline?” – Nick
“Yes, Nick. We’re going to set the book and your pendulum on fire and then use them ’cause we’re just that intelligent.” – Death”

“Bloody Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer playing God”

“Imagination is but another name for super intelligence.”

“The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.”

“The brain and muscles must develop simultaneously. Iron nerves with an intelligent brain — and the whole world is at your feet.”

“Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent.”

“They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)”

“We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. (p.9)”

“Even the greatest fool can accomplish a task if it were after his or her heart. But the intelligent ones are those who can convert every work into one that suits their taste.”

“Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.”

“American political opportunities are loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.”

“An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls — even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls — without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell.”

“Faith is not intelligent understanding, faith is deliberate commitment to a Person where I see no way.”

“It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.”

“We will not be dictated to by men with less intelligence, energy, initiative and ambition than we ourselves possess.”

“Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.'
'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence.”

“If I play a stupid girl and ask a stupid question, I've got to follow it through, what am I supposed to do, look intelligent?”

“Evolution is a design process; it’s just not an intelligent design process.”

“There is no significant idea which cannot be explained to an intelligent twelve year old boy in fifteen minutes.”

“Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places.”

“The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”

“Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.”

“I think of the thrill of an intelligent woman talking just to me.”

“Intelligence is a measure of how well you function within your level of awareness.”

“It is man's intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. … Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations.”

“No man of any intelligence would pretend to know a female mind.”

“Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.”

“I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence

-from "Splittings”

“People need to be educated so that they can make intelligent moral choices”

“Intelligence is a harder gift. For this you must work, you must practice it, challenge it, and maybe toward the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow, whereas intelligence is the substance.
-Doc”

“It was not apathy. It was an intelligent disinterest in those things that could have no bearing on one's existence.”

“On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.”

“Ninety percent of intelligence was knowing when to shut up.’ – Cherise”

“A woman is human.

She is not better, wiser, stronger, more intelligent, more creative, or more responsible than a man.

Likewise, she is never less.

Equality is a given.

A woman is human.”

“The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.”

“Now I feel like James Bond. Suave and intelligent, breaking all the codes while looking fabulous.”

“I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I could respect him.”

“Once I opened my mind to the concept of a greater power, I never struggled with it. Everywhere I went, I felt and saw the existence of a creative intelligence in this universe, of a loving power larger than myself in nature, in people, everywhere.”

“Jacoblike a totally normal young man. He's clearly intelligent. But having his day disrupted probably makes him feel the same way I would if I was suddenly told to bungee off the top of the Sears Tower.”

“The key then to attaining this higher level of intelligence is to make our years of study qualitatively rich. We don't simply absorb information - we internalize it and make it our own by finding some way to put this knowledge to practical use.”

“Surely she had endured enough for one evening without having to listen to intelligent conversation?”

“Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.”

“She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care.”

“Addicts, as a group, generally score far above average o intelligence tests.
Why?
You tell me.
I guess maybe we're smart enough to have figured out how shitty things are and we decide addiction is the only way to deal with it.”

“Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien… What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe.”

“Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.”

“being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience”

“It's not what I expected," he said. "They're far more organized than our intelligence had led us to believe.”

“Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.”

“You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.”

“The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work.”

“He was having an odd paternal rush, a blood surge that was alsoblood and was presently hunting through Howard's expansive intelligence to find words that would more effectively express something like”

“You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.”

“I'm not questioning your bravery. I'm questioning your intelligence.”

“I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That's right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent.”

“I looked into his eyes, and I realized he was the same man I'd seen in my dreams. His face might be totally different, but the same soul was in there, the same intelligence and all the sadness.”