Intelligence Quotes

The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence.

~ Lyman Bryson

Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I'm a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what's to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble--that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Kindness is strength. Good-nature is often mistaken for virtue, and good health sometimes passes for genius. Anger blows out the lamp of the mind. In the examination of a great and important question, every one should be serene, slow-pulsed, and calm. Intelligence is not the foundation of arrogance. Insolence is not logic. Epithets are the arguments of malice.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

The role of genius is not to complicate the simple, but to simplify the complicated.

~ Criss Jami

The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains.Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.

~ Timothy Leary

Creativity is the highest form of intelligence. Over time, after developing a more advanced creative brain, I started feeling that my college education was more so something to be ashamed of rather than something to be proud of.

~ Criss Jami

The hallmark of intelligence is not whether one believes in God or not, but the quality of the processes that underlie one’s beliefs.

~ Hafiz

I happen to feel that the degree of a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic.

~ Lisa Alther

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

~ Aldous Huxley

The willingness to change one’s mind in the light of new evidence is a sign of rationality not weakness.

~ Stuart Sutherland

We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it.

~ Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Armed neutrality makes it much easier to detect hypocrisy.

~ Criss Jami

Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they've never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military.

~ Maureen Dowd

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

~ Will Cuppy

The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.

~ Oscar Wilde

Every true genius is bound to be naive.

~ Friedrich Schiller

If reason ruled the world would history even exist?

~ Ryszard Kapuściński

But if one observes, one will see that the body has its own intelligence; it requires a great deal of intelligence to observe the intelligence of the body.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Sometimes people think you’re smart if you question the status quo, if nothing else.

~ Craig Ferguson

The purpose of having the orphans study all these diverse fields was not for them to just become geniuses, but to become polymaths – meaning they would be geniuses in a wide variety of fields.

~ James Morcan

It's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.

~ Maurice Sendak

You seem to think you’re insignificant, but the truth is you’re so intelligent, beautiful, kind and decent, adorable. I can’t be the first person to have fallen in love with you, and I won’t be the last. But I do believe I will love you the most.

~ Ai Mi

Whoever prefers the material comforts of life over intellectual wealth is like the owner of a palace who moves into the servants’ quarters and leaves the sumptuous rooms empty.

~ Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.

~ Oscar Wilde

I will not dumb myself down to make someone else more comfortable with their ignorance.

~ Kelli Jae Baeli

What they might lack in intelligence, they make up for with sheer quantities of high explosive.

~ Simon Morden

There's a stark difference between the words 'prodigy' and 'genius.' Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured out, geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered. Prodigies learn, geniuses do.

~ John Green

Show Holmes a drop of water and he would deduce the existence of the Atlantic. Show it to me and I would look for a tap. That was the difference between us.

~ Anthony Horowitz

If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee's eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?

~ Frans De Waal

Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.

~ Robert Anton Wilson

Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.

~ George Scialabba

Infinite is a meaningless word: except – it states / The mind is capable of performing / an endless process of addition.

~ Louis Zukofsky

Intelligence could be more briliant within modesty.

~ Toba Beta

Intelligence, Kant reminds, is not so much a result of genius, rather it is a consequence of a determination to use it.

~ Michael R. Legault

I visualized myself pulling on my mental thinking cap, jamming it down around my ears as I had taught myself to do. It was a tall, conical wizard's model, covered with chemical equations and formulae: a cornucopia of ideas.

~ Alan Bradley

How pitiful is an intelligence used only to make excuses to quieten the conscience.

~ Ignazio Silone

He's one fry short of a Happy Meal.

~ Rush Limbaugh

I am not the sharpest knife in the knife-thing.

~ Jimmy Dore

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.

~ Helen Keller

Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.

~ Christopher Isherwood