intelligence Quotes

“If I can fool a bug... I can surely fool a man. People are not as smart as bugs.”

“I don’t understand it, and I don’t like what I don’t understand.”

“Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”

“The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”

“I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.”

“It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.”

“Conceit spoils the finest genius.”

“To a great mind, nothing is little,′ remarked Holmes, sententiously.”

“Now this is the point. You fancy me a mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded...”

“Please, Lily, you are insulting your fine intelligence. Do you have any idea how smart you are?”

“Determination is as common among men who are dull and foolish as it is among those who are brilliant intellects. So, no, determination cannot be what we’re looking for.”

“It’s better to be sworn to an honest fool than to a lying scholar.”

“It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty...”

Ritie, don’t worry ‘cause you ain’t pretty. Plenty pretty women I seen digging ditches or worse. You smart. I swear to God, I rather you have a good mind than a cute behind.

“Why do men often call smart women devious?”

“Lots of crazy people are smart.”

“Kids are smarter than we think. They know how to survive the shit that’s dealt them better than some welfare worker who never spent a day in one of those kids’ shoes.”

“Guy don’t need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus’ works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain’t hardly ever a nice fella.”

“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.”

“With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet, you’re too smart to go down any not-so-good street.”

“You have never heard me talk much. But an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools.”

Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don’t you think?

If you only have brains on your head you would be as good a man as any of them, and a better man than some of them. Brains are the only things worth having in this world, no matter whether one is a crow or a man.

I had brains, and a heart also; so, having tried them both, I should much rather have a heart.

For brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.

For I consider brains far superior to money in every way. You may have noticed that if one has money without brains, he cannot use it to his advantage; but if one has brains without money, they will enable him to live comfortably to the end of his days.

I had brains, and a heart also; so, having tried them both, I should much rather have a heart.

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

“Money and titles may be hereditary,” she would say, “but brains are not.”

People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.

“My feeling for you won’t change because I’m becoming intelligent. I’ll only love you more.”

“The more intelligent you become, the more problems you’ll have.”

“My feeling for you won’t change because I’m becoming intelligent. I’ll only love you more.”

Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.

“Get smart and nothing can touch you.”

Wit and humor do not reside in slow minds.

“But even though she was attractive, there was something else about her that caught his eye. She was intelligent, he could sense that right away, and confident, too, as if she were able to move through life on her own terms. To him, these were the things that really mattered. Without them, beauty was nothing.”

“There was virtually no aspect of twentieth-century defense technology that had not been touched by the hands and minds of female mathematicians.”

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

“One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn’t be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid.”

″‘A precocious child,’ Miss Honey said, ‘is one that shows amazing intelligence early on. You are an unbelievably precocious child.‘”

“Parents never underestimated the abilities of their own children. Quite the reverse. Sometimes it was well nigh impossible for a teacher to convince the proud father or mother that their beloved offspring was a complete nitwit.”

“If you had a heart attack this minute and had to call a doctor, that doctor would be a university graduate. If you got sued for selling someone a rotten second-hand car, you’d have to get a lawyer and he’d be a university graduate, too. Do not despise clever people, Mr. Wormwood.”

“She felt wildly excited. She had just met a small girl who possessed, or so it seemed to her, quite extraordinary qualities of brilliance. There had not been time yet to find out exactly how brilliant the child was, but Miss Honey had learnt enough to realize that something had to be done about it as soon as possible. It would be ridiculous to leave a child like that stuck in the bottom form.”

“By the time she was three, Matilda had taught herself to read by studying newspapers and magazines that lay around the house. At the age of four, she could read fast and well, and she naturally began hankering after books.”

“Whenever a man supposes that he alone has intelligence or expression or feeling, he exposes himself and shows his emptiness.”

“The first opinion which one forms of a prince, and of his understanding, is by observing the men he has around him.”

“The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.”

“This ain’t got nothin’ to do with no hate or like or love or friends or anything. All we care about is surviving. Drop your sissy side and start using that shuck brain if you got one.”

“We liked to be known as the clever girls. When we decorated our hands with henna for holidays and weddings, we drew calculus and chemical formula instead of flowers and butterflies.”

“In my immature brain, I didn’t understand the difference between intelligence and knowledge. So I assumed I was an idiot.”

“People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.”

“The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”

“All of us have worries. We worry because we are intelligent beings. Intelligence predicts, that is its essence; the same intelligence that allows us to plan, hope, imagine, and hypothesize also allows us to worry and anticipate negative outcomes.”

“Intelligence takes chance with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary.”

“He was a complicated man, my father; a man of great mental capacity who was driven to succeed yet humbled into mediocrity by his own emotional limitations.”

Intellectually, they knew a great deal. Practically, they chose to know almost nothing.

“There’ll be differences of opinion in just about every intelligence analysis that you make.”

“Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.”

“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”

“The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?”

“That educated didn’t mean smart. He had a point. Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.”

“I agree with you, Mr. Scott. That dog’s too intelligent to kill. ”

“The salon existed in opposition to university lecture halls. Guests believed that knowledge and culture could both be enhanced via intelligent dialogue.”

“My grandmother India always said God had pointed a finger at our family, asking for just a bit more discipline, more praying, and more hard work because he had blessed us with good health and good brains.”

“By the time I was two, all my memories had words, and all my words had meanings. But only in my head. I have never spoken one single word.”

“Here’s the thing: I’m ridiculously smart, and I’m pretty sure I have a photographic memory. It’s like I have a camera in my head, and if I see or hear something, I click it, and it stays.”

“All of us who have all our faculties intact are just plain blessed. Melody is able to figure out things, communicate, and manage in a world where nothing works right for her. She’s the one with the true intelligence!”

“Changing size doesn’t change the brain. If I made you twenty-five tomorrow, Jim, your thoughts would still be boy thoughts, and it’d show! Or if they turned me into a boy of ten this instant, my brain would still be fifty and that boy would act funnier and older and weirder than any boy ever.”

“Hunger is a funny thing. It has a kind of intelligence of it’s own.”

″‘The young man is a genius,’ Grim is saying. ‘And I don’t use that word lightly.‘”

“You should hear him talk. I think the rest of him is so small because his brain is so big.”

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

“Mrs. Twit may have been ugly and she may have been beastly, but she was not stupid.”

“Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that’s what he wants. Mostly it’s women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him.”

“I read that the real Cleopatra wasn’t even that great-looking. She seduced everyone with how clever she was.”

“Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida.”

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own.”

“They seemed amazingly busy. I began to ask myself what they could be. Were they intelligent mechanisms? Such a thing I felt was impossible. Or did a Martian sit within each, ruling, directing, using, much as a man’s brain sits and rules in his body? I began to compare the things to human machines, to ask myself for the first time in my life how an ironclad or a steam-engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal.”

“The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed.”

“And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling, and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that generation after generation creeps upon them”

“The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these creatures fools? . . . You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything.”

“Know that in your deeper mind are infinite intelligence and infinite power.”

“Reason is man’s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.”

“Reason is man’s faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man’s ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. ”

“Beyond the senses are the objects, beyond the objects is the mind, beyond the mind is the intellect, beyond the intellect is the great Atman.”

“But they did not say the things they knew. And they knew everything. They had seen everything. They had accepted everything. And they received every new intelligence now with a cynical and amused look in their untelling eyes.”

“There are both people who have quick intelligence, and those who must withdraw and take time to think things over.”

“He’s much too smart to fall for this, but he wants it to be true. He wants it to be true more than he wants the truth. The smile that breaks across his face is cautious, but so beautiful that I can’t look away. I would lie to him again for that smile.”

“Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I’ve never been able to start or finish anything.”

“Today Plato is nearly forgotten. His beliefs include the notion that people who govern should be intelligent, rational, self-controlled, and in love with wisdom, an idea that has long been discredited.”

“But the wonderfullest trick of all was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail. . . . There is a trick that would come in handy for me—get me out of this two-by-four situation! . . . You know it don’t take much intelligence to get yourself into a nailed-up coffin, Laura. But who in hell ever got himself out of one without removing one nail?”

“Your baby is smarter than you think.”

″‘The most intelligent of creatures,’ he offers softly, ‘often make the fewest sounds.‘”

“He was too good a soldier to go around asking questions, trying to round out his knowledge. A soldier’s knowledge wasn’t supposed to be round.”

″... a woman will never do again what has been done before.”

″... intelligent following of custom, or even occasionally an intelligent deviation from custom, is better than a blind and simply mechanical adhesion to it.”

“His system was so idiotically simple that some people can’t understand it, no matter how often it is explained. The people who can’t understand it are people who have to believe, for their own peace of mind, that tremendous wealth can be produced only by tremendous cleverness.”

“Nobody knows anything, really, you know, and a woman can guess a good deal nearer than a man.”

“The dissociation between mind and matter in men and machines is very striking; it suggests that almost any stable and reliable organization of material objects can execute an algorithm and so come to command some form of intelligence.”

“God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn -- whatever they had been, they were men!”

“She isn’t stupid. She’s intelligent enough in a purely feminine way. Eighteenth-century France would have been a marvelous setting for her, or the old South if she hadn’t made the mistake of being born a Negro.”

“In this world, Elwood, you must be oh-so-smart or -oh-so-pleasant. For years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. And you may quote me.”

“Even cows know when they should go home and leave behind the fields, but an unwise man does not know the measure of his own appetite.”

Persuaded, Monday agrees to relinquish control of the key, which is shaped like the minute hand of an old clock, although he quickly becomes suspicious of Sneezer, who apparently never showed much intelligence before. Sneezer and Mister Monday then fight and disappear in a flash of light.

“That friend of yours is smarter than a cornered fox.”

“It is said that the current duke had an ancestor so wise that even as a child he could do complex mathematical calculations. prove difficult geometric theorems, and accurately locate the constellations in the sky.”

“She knew one thing: she was not pleased or proud to be able to read the alethiometer – she was afraid. Whatever power was making that needle swing and stop, it knew things like an intelligent being.”

“James was everything I desperately wanted to be and never could: talented, intelligent, worldly.”

“The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.”

“A scullery maid? Ridiculous. I was Matilda Cook, daughter of Lucille, granddaughter of Captain William Farnsworth Cook, of the Pennsylvania Fifth Regiment. I could read, write, and figure numbers faster than most. I was not afraid of hard work. I would set my own course.”

“Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.”

“It was hard to know which of Billy’s qualities was most important to his team’s success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players.”

“Don’t be angry with me, Pagan. Don’t let your temper cripple your intelligence. To squander your gifts in such a way... do you think, having found you, I would let you stray down the wrong path again?”

“You have a gift, lad. It is a treasure very few are blessed with, a mind which is capable of so much. Such a head is a dangerous thing upon young shoulders.”

“It takes a certain intelligence to love like that – softly, without props. But the world is such a showpiece, maybe that’s why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel onstage just to prove they can think up things too: handsome scary things like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire. They fail of course. The world outdoes them every time.”

“Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty.... -- the clown of love. They don’t know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that -- softly, without props.”

“Nothing hostile about them; in fact smiling and well-mannered. Wasn’t it Baudin who described them as full of fun and ‘of a fine intelligence’? And they certainly had a great sense of dignity.”

“And now you’re becalmed. Just like I was at your age. Wouldn’t think to look at me I was bright as a dollar once, would you? But I was. Wanted to make something of myself. But I didn’t have a chance. Taken out of school, I was. Just like you.”

“His intelligence was so keen, and so original!- and he had a quality of thought such as I have never found in any other person.”

“I’m not a complete idiot, you know. You don’t have to look so surprised that I know some big words.”

“They were lucky enough to own a young married couple of humans named Mr. and Mrs. Dearly, who were gentle, obedient, and unusually intelligent—almost canine at times.”

“Sooner or later, human intelligence returned to the cosmos. But except from their shared ancestry, these new people had nothing in common with ‘people’ of today, or even each other.”

Then he had an idea, and I think that for a Bear of Very Little Brain, it was a good idea.

“Do you see, Pooh? Do you see, Piglet? Brains first and then Hard Work. Look at it! That’s the way to build a house,” said Eeyore proudly.

He’s bound to be suspicious of everybody in the house, and more particularly of us, because we’re presumably more intelligent than the others.

“That little redheaded girl they have over at Cuthbert’s is as smart as they make ‘em.

She seems to have a skill and presence of mind perfectly wonderful in a child of her age.

“Ah, that wonderful Madam Mina! She has man’s brain—a brain that a man should have were he much gifted—and a woman’s heart.

That mighty brain and that iron resolution went with him to his grave, and are even now arrayed against us.

“I had nearly five thousand volumes in my library at Rome; but after reading them over many times, I found out that with one hundred and fifty well-chosen books a man possesses, if not a complete summary of all human knowledge, at least all that a man need really know.

Women of that class have great opportunities, and if they are intelligent may be well worth listening to.

“Too clever! No, my boy, you’re too clever. That beats everything.”

He is a man of intelligence, but to act sensibly, intelligence is not enough.