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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:

Perfect works are rare, because they must be produced at the happy moment when taste and genius unite; and this rare conjuncture, like that of certain planets, appears to occur only after the revolution of several cycles, and only lasts for an instant.

François-René de Chateaubriand

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man—but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.

Ludwig Wittgenstein Culture and Value (1980)

Even if we accept, as the basic tenet of true democracy, that one moron is equal to one genius, is it necessary to go a further step and hold that two morons are better than one genius?

Leó Szilárd The Voice of the Dolphins : And Other Stories (1961)

Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual.

Ammon Hennacy

There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not sooner or later responded.

James Russell Lowell Literary Essays, vol. II (1870)

So far as I can remember, there's not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

Bertrand Russell

Genius resembles a bell; in order to ring it must be suspended into pure air, and when a foreign body touches it, its joyful tone is silenced.

Franz Grillparzer Notebooks and Diaries (1809)

Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?

John Keats

It is amazing how oppressive is the cleverness of some people, as if it were quite a duty in you to be clever too—

Letitia Elizabeth Landon Romance and Reality (1831)

The intellectual power, through words and things,
Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way!

William Wordsworth

Whilst the exploits of the conqueror and the intrigues of the demagogue are faithfully preserved through a succession of ages, the persevering and unobtrusive efforts of genius, developing the best blessings of the Deity to man, are often consigned to oblivion.

David Mushet Samuel Smiles (1864)

In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely urging the manufacture.

Henri Bergson Creative Evolution (1907)

The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

Aristotle

[H]e is of the intelligentsia (which means he has been educated beyond his intelligence).

Fulton J. Sheen Peace of Soul (1949)

Intellectuals … advertise their superiority to political practice but are absolutely in its thrall. … It is no accident that Marxist theory and practice use the intellectuals as tools and keep them in brutal subservience.

Allan Bloom Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Vivitur ingenio, that damn'd motto there
Seduced me first to be a wicked player.

George Farquhar

Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.

Roy Blount Jr.

Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.

Vladimir Nabokov What Is the Sangha?: The Nature of Spritual Community (2001)

The intelligence is defeated as soon as the expression of one's thoughts is preceded, explicitly or implicitly, by the little word 'we'. And when the light of the intelligence grows dim, it is not very long before the love of good becomes lost.

Simone Weil The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (1949)

A genius is someone who discovers that the stone that falls and the moon that doesn't fall represent one and the same phenomenon.

Ernesto Sábato

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