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Intelligence Quotes

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
Ezra Pound

A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
James Joyce

A person must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere.
Charles Kettering

A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid the mistake altogether.
Roy H. Williams

A woman has to be intelligent, have charm, a sense of humor, and be kind. It's the same qualities I require from a man.
Catherine Deneuve

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Action is the real measure of intelligence.
Napoleon Hill

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you.
Theodor Adorno

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.
Jean-Paul Sartre

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Always be smarter than the people who hire you.
Lena Horne

An intellectual is a man who doesn't know how to park a bike.
Spiro T. Agnew

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
Albert Camus

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
Ernest Hemingway

An intelligent person is never afraid or ashamed to find errors in his understanding of things.
Bryant H. McGill

Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.
Alan Alda

Be smarter than other people, just don't tell them so.
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are.
Julius Charles Hare

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers.
Janis Joplin

Belief is the death of intelligence.
Robert Anton Wilson

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Common sense is not so common.
Voltaire

Don't leave home without your sword - your intellect.
Alan Moore

Every true genius is bound to be naive.
Friedrich Schiller

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
Henry Ford

Genius ain't anything more than elegant common sense.
Josh Billings

Genius always finds itself a century too early.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Genius is initiative on fire.
Holbrook Jackson

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
E. B. White

Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience.
Paul Cezanne

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
Charles Bukowski

Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day.
Samuel Goldwyn

God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.
Francis Bacon

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
Oscar Wilde

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.
Socrates

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.
Mark Twain

I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.
Woodrow Wilson

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.
Tom Robbins

If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?
Scott Adams

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury

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.
Steve Jobs

I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb... and I also know that I'm not blonde.
Dolly Parton

I'm not the smartest fellow in the world, but I can sure pick smart colleagues.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.
Stephen Hawking

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
Victor Hugo

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
Salvador Dali

It is better to have a fair intellect that is well used than a powerful one that is idle.
Bryant H. McGill

It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.
Michel de Montaigne

It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.
G. H. Hardy

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.
George Bernard Shaw

It takes a lot of things to prove you are smart, but only one thing to prove you are ignorant.
Don Herold

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
Lewis Carroll

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
James Madison

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
Marcel Proust

Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
Ambrose Bierce

Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart.
Henri Frederic Amiel

Man is the most intelligent of the animals - and the most silly.
Diogenes

My success was not based so much on any great intelligence but on great common sense.
Helen Gurley Brown

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
Carl Jung

People are smarter than you might think.
John Astin

Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.
A. A. Milne

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
Blaise Pascal

Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years.
Gracie Allen

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read With loads of learned lumber in his head.
Alexander Pope

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.
Carl Sagan

The brighter you are, the more you have to learn.
Don Herold

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Albert Einstein

The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain.
Daniel Goleman

The higher the voice the smaller the intellect.
Ernest Newman

The intellect of the wise is like glass; it admits the light of heaven and reflects it.
Augustus Hare

The intelligent man is one who has successfully fulfilled many accomplishments, and is yet willing to learn more.
Ed Parker

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
Plutarch

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.
Bill Watterson

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
Sigmund Freud

There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.
Ronald Reagan

There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
John Fowles

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
George Orwell

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.
Aristotle

There is no greater evidence of superior intelligence than to be surprised at nothing.
Josh Billings

There is no method but to be very intelligent.
T. S. Eliot

There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.
Don Herold

To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.
Oscar Wilde

To think is to practice brain chemistry.
Deepak Chopra

We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
John Kenneth Galbraith

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.
Timothy Leary

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
George Orwell

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.
Carl Jung

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
Albert Einstein

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
Sigmund Freud

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift

Wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked.
Steve Wozniak

Wit is educated insolence.
Aristotle

You have to be smart. The easy days are over.
Robert Kiyosaki

Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.
Roger Ebert

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