Quotes on Intelligence

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.

There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought

We live in worlds that we have forged and composed. It's much more true than any of the species that you see. I mean, it seems to me that one of the most distinctive features of human intelligence is the capacity to imagine, to project out of our own immediate circumstances and to bring to mind things that aren't present here and now.

His ignorance covers the world like a blanket, and there's scarcely a hole in it anywhere.

Understanding vision and building visual systems is really understanding intelligence.

The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.

The first step in the acquisition of wisdom is silence, the second listening, the third memory, the fourth practice, the fifth teaching others.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

To young people born under the weird planet of the SAT, intelligence was equated with agility, with raw acuity. It produced a certain sort of person of which I was a typical specimen: the mental contortionist, able to rise to almost every challenge placed before him, except the challenge of real self-knowledge.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. School is basically about one point of view -- the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.

If it had not been for the discontent of a few fellows who had not been satisfied with their conditions, you would still be living in caves. Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

The profound thinker always suspects that he is superficial.

Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.

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

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.

The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

I have great faith in fools,— self-confidence my friends will call it.