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
Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition.
Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.
Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.
The man who perceives life only with his eye, his ear, his hand, and his tongue, is but little higher than the ox or an intelligent dog; but he who has imagination sees things around and above him, as the angels see them.
Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you're deprived of it.
Since all of us desire to be happy, and since we evidently become so on account of our use—that is our good use—of other things, and since knowledge is what provides this goodness of use and also good fortune, every man must, as seems plausible, prepare himself by every means for this: to be as wise as possible. Right?
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