Intelligence Quotes - Page 51

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

He's one fry short of a Happy Meal.

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

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

In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.

Robert G. Ingersoll

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Imagination is but another name for super intelligence.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

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

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.

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.

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

Walter Lippmann

I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.

Johannes Kepler

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

Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked

R. Buckminster Fuller

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.

You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.

I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The habits of a vigorous mind are born in contending with difficulties.

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

Dorothy L. Sayers

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

Not stupid. Overly trusting, maybe, but that reflects on his lack of trustworthiness, not on your intelligence.

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

He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy. They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would?Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.

Neal Stephenson

Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire.A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Pooh hasn't much Brain, but he never comes to any harm. He does silly things and they turn out right. There's Owl. Owl hasn't exactly got Brain, but he Knows Things. He would know the Right Thing to Do when Surrounded by Water. There's Rabbit. He hasn't Learnt in Books, but he can always Think of a Clever Plan. There's Kanga. She isn't Clever, Kanga isn't, but she would be so anxious about Roo that she would do a Good Thing to Do without thinking about it. And then there's Eeyore. And Eeyore is so miserable anyhow that he wouldn't mind about this.

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.

The most intelligent people disguise the fact that they are intelligent. Wise men do not wear nametags. The more people talk about their own skills, the more desperate they are—their work should speak for itself.

NisiOisiN

Intelligence entails a strong mind, but genius entails a heart of a lion in tune with a strong mind.

I wonder if anyone but me realizes what goes on in that head back of your deceptively sweet face.

Margaret Mitchell

[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

George Bernard Shaw

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.

I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.

Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.

Why is being a nerd bad? Saying I notice you’re a nerd is like saying, ‘Hey, I notice that you’d rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you’d rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Linsey Lohan. Why is that?

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

One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so—but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous.

The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other in opposite directions.

The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mindabout nothing -- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.

Controversial' as we all know, is often a euphemism for 'interesting and intelligent.

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

I have a little theory that I'd like to air here, if I may. What is it that you think makes you magicians?" More silence. Fogg was well into rhetorical-question territory now anyway. He spoke more softly. "Is it because you are intelligent? Is it because you are brave and good? Is is because you're special? Maybe. Who knows. But I'll tell you something: I think you're magicians because you're unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength. Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.

Anyone who knew Violet well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was tied up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes. Violet had a real knack for inventing and building strange devices, so her brain was often filled with images of pulleys, levers, and gears, and she never wanted to be distracted by something as trivial as her hair.

Men have called me mad; but the question is not settled whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence -- whether much that is glorious -- whether all that is profound -- does not spring from disease of thought -- from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who only dream by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the ‘light ineffable’.

Edgar Allan Poe

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.

Edgar Allan Poe

Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.

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