Quotes about intelligence
page 5

“But perhaps he had enough animal strength and detached intelligence that he could make another start.”

Ernest Hemingway book Islands in the Stream

Source: Islands in the Stream

“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.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Random Thoughts http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell101705.asp, Oct. 17, 2005 <br class="br">2000s

People, Education, Way, Feeling

“[…] 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.”

Nick Hornby About a Boy

Source: About a Boy

Love, Beauty, Feeling

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

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Unpublished notebook from 1845-50. Published in Seebacher (ed.), Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 10, p. 158 (Laffont, 1989). English translation from Robb, Victor Hugo p. 249 (Norton, 1997).

Exercises, Imagination

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

Robin Hobb (1952) American fiction writer (pseudonym)

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

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer

Fashion

“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.”

Jim Butcher (1971) American author

Support, Change, Animals

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

Gustave Flaubert book Sentimental Education

Source: Sentimental Education

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.”

Truman G. Madsen (1926–2009) American educator

Source: Eternal Man

Question, Universe

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

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

People, Religion, Business

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

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: On Love

Love, 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.”

Ken Robinson (1950) UK writer

TED Conference http://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html

Communication, Sense, Heart, Dependency

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Crack-Up

Source: Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)
Context: 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.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

History, Idea, Time

“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.”

Cecelia Ahern book Love, Rosie

Source: Love, Rosie

Family

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

Hamza Yusuf (1958) American Islamic scholar

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/158902.Hamza_Yusuf

Wise

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

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Light, 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.”

David Ogilvy book Confessions of an Advertising Man

Source: Confessions of an Advertising Man, p. 96 (Ballantine Books)

“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.”

Paul Goodman (1911–1972) American novelist, playwright, poet and psychotherapist

Feeling, Sense

“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.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

People, Stupidity, Way

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

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

Source: Batman: Arkham Asylum - A Serious House on Serious Earth

Children, Dreams, Suffering

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

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

People, Teachers

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

Jack London book The Star Rover

The Star Rover
Variant: Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel

Men, Stupidity

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

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

Marriage

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

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“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.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

Source: The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

People, Stupidity, Education

“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.”

Jayne Ann Krentz (1948) American novelist

Books, Courage, Understanding

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

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

“belief is the death of intelligence.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Source: Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

Death

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

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Help

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

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

“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.”

Louise Erdrich (1954) writer from the United States

Source: The Painted Drum

Bird, Light

“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”

Lilian Jackson Braun (1913–2011) author

Source: The Cat Who Saw Stars

Love, Hate, World, Peace

“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."”

U.G. Krishnamurti (1918–2007) Indian philosopher

Part 2: The Mystique of Enlightenment
The Mystique of Enlightenment (1982)
Source: The Mystique of Enlightenment: The Radical Ideas of U.G. Krishnamurti

Way, Nature

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

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Source: Death by Black Hole - And Other Cosmic Quandaries

Science

“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.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Walking (June 1862)
Source: Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

Dreams, Knowledge

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

Richard Kadrey (1957) San Francisco-based novelist, freelance writer, and photographer

Source: Butcher Bird

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

Walter Moers book The City of Dreaming Books

Source: The City of Dreaming Books

Way, Thinking, Reading

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

Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince

Source: The Prince

Men

“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…”

Eva Ibbotson A Company of Swans

Source: A Company of Swans

Beauty, Thinking, Passion

“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.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

222
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
Source: Minority Report

Democracy, History, Fraud

“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.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

People, Imagination, Nature, Change

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

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: The Ladies of the Corridor

“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.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Education

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

Susan Elizabeth Phillips book It Had to Be You

Source: It Had to Be You

“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”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

Death, Books, Help

“Bloody Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer playing God”

Elizabeth Wein book Code Name Verity

Source: Code Name Verity

God

“Imagination is but another name for super intelligence.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) American writer

Imagination

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

George Lucas (1944) American film producer

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

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

World

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

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Game, Football

“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)”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

World, Thinking, Falseness

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

Ken Robinson (1950) UK writer

Source: The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

Feeling, Imagination

“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.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Fools, Heart

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

Lev Grossman The Magicians

Source: The Magicians

Tree

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

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Richard Dawkins on militant atheism http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html, (February 2002) <br class="br">Context: We've reached a truly remarkable situation: a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligencia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists, and probably the majority of the intelligencia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it: the intelligencia, unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly American political opportunities are heavily 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.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

"America's Medieval Women," Harper's Magazine (August 1938)

Education

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

Oswald Chambers (1874–1917) British missionary

Faith, Way, Understanding, Personality

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Men

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

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Men

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

Rafael Sabatini book Scaramouche

Source: Scaramouche

Thinking, Heart

“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?”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Stupidity, Girl, Question

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

Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

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

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Boy, Idea

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

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

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

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

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

Jon Kabat-Zinn (1944) American academic

Source: Wherever You Go, There You Are

Freedom

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

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Source: Solipsist

Thinking

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

Scott Adams (1957) cartoonist, writer

Source: God's Debris: A Thought Experiment

“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.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 270
Context: 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. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough.

World

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

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: When He Was Wicked

“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.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Chapter 3, "The lazy controller", page 46 (ISBN 9780141033570).

Memory

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

-from "Splittings”

Adrienne Rich book The Dream of a Common Language

Source: The Dream of a Common Language

Love, Time

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

Gary L. Francione (1954) American legal scholar

People, Education

“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”

Bryce Courtenay (1933–2012) Australian novelist

Life

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

Tanith Lee Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer

Source: Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer

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

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Truth, Lie

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

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

“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.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

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

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

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

Jim Butcher Dead Beat

Source: Dead Beat

Feeling

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

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“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.”

Anthony Kiedis book Scar Tissue

Source: Scar Tissue

Love, People, Nature, Universe

“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.”

Jodi Picoult book House Rules

Source: House Rules

Way, Feeling

“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.”

Robert Greene book Mastery

Source: Mastery

Way, Knowledge, Study

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

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm

“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.”

Tom Sharpe (1928–2013) English satirical novelist

Source: Wilt On High

Faith, Democracy, Sense, Training

“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.”

Douglas Adams book Mostly Harmless

Source: Mostly Harmless

Secret, World, Understanding, Dead

“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.”

James Frey book A Million Little Pieces

Source: A Million Little Pieces

Way

“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.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Feeling, Universe, Rage

“Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Courage, Thinking, Courageous

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

Malcolm Gladwell book Blink

Source: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Education

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

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: The Battle for Skandia

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

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Source: Complete Essays 3, 1930-35

Children

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

Philip Roth book American Pastoral

Source: American Pastoral

Nature

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

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

Source: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence

“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”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

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

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

Interview with Julius Lester, "James Baldwin: Reflections of a Maverick" in The New York Times (27 May 1984)
Variant: You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.