Quotes about Intelligence

an intellect that positively excels even in one single direction is among the rarest of natural phenomena.

Hence much reading deprives the mind of all elasticity, as a weight continually pressing upon it does a spring, and the most certain means of never having any original thoughts is to take a book in hand at once, at every spare moment. This practice is the reason why scholarship makes most men more unintelligent and stupid than they are by nature, and deprives their writings of all success; they are, as Pope says— 'For ever reading, never to be read'.

Men of very great capacity, will as a rule, find the company of very stupid people preferable to that of the common run; for the same reason that the tyrant and the mob, the grandfather and the grandchildren, are natural allies.

It was only in the first few years that she felt herself screaming silently, at times, for a glimpse of human ability, a single glimpse of clean, hard, radiant competence. She had fits of tortured longing for a friend or enemy with a mind better than her own.

Nothing is better than reading and gaining more and more knowledge.

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet

The human race does not have a very good record of intelligent behaviour.

This intelligent life need not be anything like humans. Little green men would do as well. In fact, they might do rather better. The human race does not have a very good record of intelligent behaviour.

We are used to thinking of intelligent life as an inevitable consequence of evolution, but what if it isn't? The Anthropic Principle should warn us to be wary of such arguments. It is more likely that evolution is a random process, with intelligence as only one of a large number of possible outcomes.

There is no time to wait for Darwinian evolution to make us more intelligent and better natured. But we are now entering a new phase of what might be called self-designed evolution, in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA.

Knowing what to say is sense, when to say it is intelligence, how to say it is wisdom, why and how to say it is enlightenment.

Esteem intelligence, cherish knowledge, and value understanding, but trust wisdom.