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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:

Well, I suppose we have to have young intellectuals, if we’re ever to survive to be middle-aged philosophers.

Algis Budrys Some Will Not Die (1961)

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, he ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from the rest of mankind.

Salvador Dalí Diary of a Genius (1964)

But genius must be born, and never can be taught.

John Dryden

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature.

Josiah Gilbert Holland

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

Woodrow Wilson

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.

Henri Bergson Creative Evolution (1907)

The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.

Eric Hoffer The Ordeal of Change (1963)

We really seek intelligence not for the answers it may suggest to the problems of life, but because we believe it is life,—not for aid in making the will of God prevail, but because we believe it is the will of God. We love it, as we love virtue, for its own sake, and we believe it is only virtue’s other and more precise name.

John Erskine The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent (1915)

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Aphorisms (1765)

Genius is the aptitude for seeing invisible things, for stirring intangible things, for painting things that have no features.

Joseph Joubert The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)

Doing easily what others find it difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius.

Isaac D'Israeli

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Victor Hugo

The hand that follows intellect can achieve.

Michelangelo

Works of the intellect are great only by comparison with each other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Few of the great tragedies of history were created by the village idiot, and many by the village genius.

Thomas Sowell

We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.

Susan Sontag

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