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Intelligence Quotes

Emerson leads this page, followed by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Isaac D’Israeli, the American humorist Josh Billings and Simone Weil. For sourced lines there is Disraeli, in Contarini Fleming (1832), saying patience is a necessary ingredient of genius, and Emerson in English Traits (1856), remarking that the hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.

Three popular lines carry flags. “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent” is credited to Einstein and marked misattributed. A line about the centuries rarely producing a genius, credited to David Lloyd George, is also marked misattributed. William Feather’s remark that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person is disputed.

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Most quoted on intelligence:

Twenty years ago it was still a compliment to say of a man that he was clever, cultivated, interested in the things of the mind. Today ‘highbrow’ is a term of contemptuous abuse. The fact is surely significant. In decent Anglo-Saxon society one may not be a highbrow.

Aldous Huxley

Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children."

Luke the Evangelist

As the saints and prophets were often forced to practise long vigils and fastings and prayers before their ecstasies would fall upon them and their visions would appear, so Virtue in its purest and most exalted form can only be acquired by means of severe and long continued culture of the mind. Persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience; but the conscience itself will be defective. … To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall.

William Winwood Reade The Martyrdom of Man (1872)

Ever since the French revolution there has developed a vicious, cretinizing tendency to consider a genius (apart from his work) as a human being more or less the same in every sense as other ordinary mortals. This is wrong. And if this is wrong for me, the genius of the greatest spiritual order or our day, a true modern genius, it is even more wrong when applied to those who incarnated the almost divine genius of the Renaissance, such as Raphael.

Salvador Dalí Diary of a Genius (1964)

Knowledge is the food of the soul; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like the dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body; for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are really beneficial or hurtful.

Plato

The life of the most successful writer has rarely been other than of toil and privation; and here I cannot but notice a singularly absurd "popular fancy," that genius and industry are incompatible. The one is inherent in the other. A mind so constituted has a restlessness in its powers, which forces them into activity.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

All the means of action —
The shapeless masses, the materials —
Lie everywhere about us. What we need
Is the celestial fire to change the flint
Into transparent crystal, bright and clear.
That fire is genius!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Spanish Student (1843)

'Tis good-will makes intelligence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I believe in "intelligence," and I believe also that there are inherited differences in intellectual ability, but I do not believe that intelligence is a simple scalar endowment that can be quanitified by attaching a single figure to it—an I.Q. or the like.

Peter Medawar Advice to a Young Scientist (1979)

The genuinely extraordinary person is the genuine ordinary person. The more of the universally human an individual can actualize in his life, the more extraordinary a human being he is. The less of the universal he can assimilate, the more imperfect he is. It is true that he may then be an extraordinary person, but not in the good sense.

Søren Kierkegaard

The intellectual forces of the workers and peasants are growing and getting stronger in their fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the educated classes, the lackeys of capital, who consider themselves the brains of the nation. In fact they are not its brains but its shit.

Vladimir Lenin

The genius is an omnipotent Ansich [in-itself] which as such would rock the whole world. For the sake of order, another figure appears along with him, namely, fate. Fate is nothing. It is the genius himself who discovers it, and the more profound the genius, the more profoundly he discovers fate, because that figure is merely the anticipation of providence.

Søren Kierkegaard

Some recent philosophers seem to have given their moral approval to these deplorable verdicts that affirm that the intelligence of an individual is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be augmented. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we will try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing.

Alfred Binet Les idées modernes sur les enfants (1909)

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Thomas Edison

There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Oscar Levant

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers.

Robert A. Heinlein Friday (1982)

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

Gertrude Stein Everybody’s Autobiography (1937)

Generosity is a virtue more frequently found in the small top layers than among the masses. After all, it takes intelligence to suspect that generosity very often pays while egotism does not.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn Monarchy and War (2000)

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

William James The Principles of Psychology (1890)

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