Intelligence Quotes

“Intelligence minus purpose equals stupidity.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.”
― Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“I expect that you must receive top marks at school, young lady."
Madeleine smiled as she stirred her tea. "There are always rewards for those who state the obvious frequently and with conviction.”
― Scott Westerfeld, Touching Darkness

“The most intelligent people disguise the fact that they are intelligent. Wise men do not wear nametags. The more people talk about their own skills, the more desperate they are—their work should speak for itself.”
― NisiOisiN, Death Note: Another Note - The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases

“Is intelligence always good? I wonder. What if intelligence is wasted? What if intelligence leads to more loneliness rather than to fulfillment? What if instead of productivity and clarity, it generates pain, isolation, and regret?”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy.

They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?

Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would?

Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.

Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“The key then to attaining this higher level of intelligence is to make our years of study qualitatively rich. We don't simply absorb information - we internalize it and make it our own by finding some way to put this knowledge to practical use.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery

“Intelligence entails a strong mind, but genius entails a heart of a lion in tune with a strong mind.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“Not stupid. Overly trusting, maybe, but that reflects on his lack of trustworthiness, not on your intelligence.”
― Tammara Webber, Easy

“A knavish speech sleeps in a fool's ear.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Pooh hasn't much Brain, but he never comes to any harm. He does silly things and they turn out right. There's Owl. Owl hasn't exactly got Brain, but he Knows Things. He would know the Right Thing to Do when Surrounded by Water. There's Rabbit. He hasn't Learnt in Books, but he can always Think of a Clever Plan. There's Kanga. She isn't Clever, Kanga isn't, but she would be so anxious about Roo that she would do a Good Thing to Do without thinking about it. And then there's Eeyore. And Eeyore is so miserable anyhow that he wouldn't mind about this.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“In the make-up of human beings, intelligence counts for more than our hands, and that is our true strength.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“Beyond all sciences, philosophies, theologies, and histories, a child's relentless inquiry is truly all it takes to remind us that we don't know as much as we think we know.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“No matter how tiny you look, you can lead huge men if you have what the huge men don't have.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains.

Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.”
― Timothy Leary, Chaos & Cyber Culture

“تاریخ کے حساس اِنسانوں نے اپنی زِندگی کا زیادہ حصّہ اداس رہ کر گزارا ہے۔
زِندگی میں خوش رہنے کے لیے بہت زیادہ ہمّت بلکہ بہت زیادہ بےحسی چاہیے۔

جون ایلیأ”
― Jaun Elia

“Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution.”
― Anonymus Autor

“You seem to think you’re insignificant, but the truth is you’re so intelligent, beautiful, kind and decent, adorable. I can’t be the first person to have fallen in love with you, and I won’t be the last. But I do believe I will love you the most.”
― Ai Mi, Under the Hawthorn Tree

“I must tell you, however, that if you refuse us, you face death.”
― Karl Braungart, Lost Identity

“In the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers’ broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope.”
― Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams

“It's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.”
― Maurice Sendak, The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to Present

“You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Les dimanches d'un bourgeois de Paris, et autres aventures parisiennes

“Intelligence is composed mostly of imagination, insight, things that have nothing to do with reason.”
― Vivienne Westwood

“Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.”
― Linus Torvalds

“However modest one may be in one's demand for intellectual cleanliness, one cannot help feeling, when coming into contact with the New Testament, a kind of inexpressible discomfiture: for the unchecked impudence with which the least qualified want to raise their voice on the greatest problems, and even claim to be judges of things, surpasses all measure. The shameless levity with which the most intractable problems (life, world, God, purpose of life) are spoken of, as if they were not problems at all but simply things that these little bigots KNEW!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Imagination is but another name for super intelligence.”
― Edgar Rice Burroughs

“Happiness will grow if you plant the seeds of love in the garden of hope with compassion and care.”
― Debasish Mridha

“   “I have good news. The plan is a go. We can begin the project to get the nuclear energy discovery.”
― Karl Braungart, Fatal Identity