Intelligence Quotes

“Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy," said my father as he watched the three beauties. "But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?”
― Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence

“Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”
― Martin Luther

“We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History

“The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.”
― Diane Arbus, Revelations

“But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“It's hard to decide who's truly brilliant; it's easier to see who's driven, which in the long run may be more important.”
― Michael Crichton, Congo

“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, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.”
― G.H. Hardy

“The moon is the reflection of your heart and moonlight is the twinkle of your love.”
― Debasish Mridha

“I see... the way you're always searching. How much you hate anything fake or phony. How you're older than your years, but still... playful, like a little girl. How you're always looking into people, or wondering what they see when they look back at you. Your eyes. It's all in the eyes.”
― Claudia Gray, A Thousand Pieces of You

“The man of thought who will not act is ineffective; the man of action who will not think is dangerous.”
― Richard M. Nixon

“Intelligence is not a competition," she said. "There is plenty to go around, and there are many ways it can be demonstrated.”
― Chris Colfer, The Enchantress Returns

“I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.”
― Elon Musk

“The habits of a vigorous mind are born in contending with difficulties.”
― Abigail Adams

“Why are you not smarter? It's only the rich who can't afford to be smart. They're compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they can't leave. But you two. We three. We're free.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence.
Or insanity.”
― Richard Kadrey, Butcher Bird

“Intelligence is more important than strength, that is why earth is ruled by men and not by animals.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“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

“I want my children to understand the world, but not just because the world is fascinating and the human mind is curious. I want them to understand it so that they will be positioned to make it a better place”
― Howard Gardner

“The intelligent desire self-control; children want candy.”
― Rumi

“Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld

“Mental acuity of any kind comes from solving problems yourself, not from being told how to solve them.”
― Paul Lockhart, A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
― George Orwell

“I don't think science is hard to teach because humans aren't ready for it, or because it arose only through a fluke, or because, by and large, we don't have the brainpower to grapple with it. Instead, the enormous zest for science that I see in first-graders and the lesson from the remnant hunter-gatherers both speak eloquently: A proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us, in all times, places, and cultures. It has been the means for our survival. It is our birthright. When, through indifference, inattention, incompetence, or fear of skepticism, we discourage children from science, we are disenfranchising them, taking from them the tools needed to manage their future.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“I drink cup of sunlight every morning to brighten myself.”
― Debasish Mridha

“Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.”
― Charlie Munger

“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, Brave New World

“Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. ”
― Jef Mallett