My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
Interpretation
The quote humorously suggests that being highly educated doesn't necessarily equate to being wise or intelligent.
Arthur C. Clarke's quote plays on the idea that formal education and intelligence are not always aligned. It implies that one can acquire a lot of knowledge through education but may still lack the common sense or insight that represents true intelligence. This points to the potential absurdity of valuing academic qualifications over practical wisdom.
In practice
In a discussion about the value of formal education vs. practical experience.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence
If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.
When you exercise your freedom to express yourself at the lowest level, you ultimately condemn yourself to live at that level.
I know that my books are worthy, which is separate from me.
We all have this place in us, a place of strength, harmony and wisdom, but most of the time we don't live there How can we course-correct faster? How can we encourage each other to live in that place more?
A man can counterfeit love, he can counterfeit faith, he can counterfeit hope and all the other graces, but it is very difficult to counterfeit humility.
There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.
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