Quotes on Intelligence

Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

At the simplest level, only people who know they do not know everything will be curious enough to find things out.

The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.

He who is not aware of his ignorance will be only misled by his knowledge.

I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.

During the last century, and part of the one before, it was widely held that there was an unreconcilable conflict between knowledge and belief.

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation._x000D_ _x000D_ Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.

In order to acquire intellect one must need it. One loses it when it is no longer necessary.

I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

Vladimir: I don't understand. Estragon: Use your intelligence, can't you? Vladimir uses his intelligence. Vladimir: (finally) I remain in the dark.

Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.

I'm an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.

If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.