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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:

Your intelligence often bears the same relation to your heart as the library of a château does to its owner.

Nicolas Chamfort

Perhaps, in spite of her brilliance, she’s too young to realize the hostility of the world toward intelligence.

Mark Clifton

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

Stephen Leacock

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

Václav Havel Disturbing the Peace (1986)

Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

Glorious indeed is the world of God around us, but more glorious the world of God within us. There lies the Land of Song; there lies the poet's native land.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Hyperion (1839)

A man is not a wall, whose stones are crushed upon the road; or a pipe, whose fragments are thrown away at a street corner. The fragments of an intellect are always good.

George Sand

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

George Santayana The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911)

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.

Noam Chomsky

As diamond cuts diamond, and one hone smooths a second, all the parts of intellect are whetstones to each other; and genius, which is but the result of their mutual sharpening, is character too.

Cyrus Augustus Bartol Radical Problems (1872)

The first and last thing demanded of genius is love of truth.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Maxims and Reflections (1833)

There iz this difference between genius and common sense in a fox: Common sense iz governed bi circumstances, but circumstances iz governed by genius.

Josh Billings

Genius after all ain't ennything more than elegant kommon sense.

Josh Billings

Tallent must hav memory, genius don't require it.

Josh Billings

Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius.

Isaac D'Israeli

Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.

James Russell Lowell Fable for Critics (1848)

Genius inspires this thirst for fame: there is no blessing undesired by those to whom Heaven gave the means of winning it.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël Corinne (1807)

Genius is a capacity for taking trouble.

Leslie Stephen

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

E. B. White One Man's Meat (1944)

An ounce of prudence is worth a pound of cleverness.

Baltasar Gracián The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

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