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
He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars.
I have always fought for ideas - until I learned that it isn't ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten.
Yet how hard most people work for mere dust and ashes and care, taking no thought of growing in knowledge and grace, never having time to get in sight of their own ignorance.
Intelligence, integrity and courage are the great pillars that support the State. Above all, the citizens of a free nation should honor the brave and independent man - the man of stainless integrity, of will and intellectual force.
Wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
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