Intelligence Quotes

Intelligence comes in more flavors than IQ tests can measure. These quotes explore different kinds of smarts — emotional, creative, street, academic — and the humbling realization that the smartest people are usually the ones who know how much they do not know.

“I think there's a supreme power behind the whole thing, an intelligence. Look at all of the instincts of nature, both animals and plants, the very ingenious ways they survive. If you cut yourself, you don't have to think about it.”

Clyde Tombaugh

More Intelligence Quotes

“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.”

Carl Jung

“It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.”

Stephen Hawking

“Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.”

Winston Churchill

“Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.”

Thomas A. Edison

“Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.”

Stephen Leacock

“Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.”

Salvador Dali

“Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

“Most good actors have a huge intelligence about the human condition and a real open heart to different kinds of people and behavior.”

Tim Robbins

“I take parenting incredibly seriously. I want to be there for my kids and help them navigate the world, and develop skills, emotional intelligence, to enjoy life, and I'm lucky to be able to do that and have two healthy, normal boys.”

Joan Cusack

“So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.”

Bertrand Russell

“The assumption is that the right kind of society is an organic being not merely analogous to an organic being, but actually a living structure with appetites and digestions, instincts and passions, intelligence and reason.”

Herbert Read

“From the lowest animals of which we can affirm intelligence up to man this type of intellect is found.”

Edward Thorndike

“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.”

Michael Jordan

“To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.”

Oscar Wilde

“When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'”

Brian Eno

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