Intelligence

Intelligence is a property of mind that encompasses many related mental abilities, such as the capacities to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend ideas and language, and learn.

Quotes

• Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
  • Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

• She should be my counsellor,
  But not my tyrant. For the spirit needs
  Impulses from a deeper source than hers;
  And there are motions, in the mind of man,
  That she must look upon with awe.
  • William Cullen Bryant, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 353

• Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as strong to think.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 353

• Thou living ray of intellectual fire.
  • William Falconer, The Shipwreck (1762), Canto I, line 104

• 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 Crack-Up", Esquire Magazine (February 1936)

• Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
  • Garden of Folly, "The Perfect Salesman" (1924)

• An ounce of prudence is worth a pound of cleverness.
  • Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647), Maxim 92

• The surest way to be deceived is to think oneself more clever than others.
  • François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (1665–1678), Maxim 127

• The desire of appearing clever often prevents our becoming so.
  • François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (1665–1678), Maxim 199

• The intellect has only one failing, which to be sure, is a very considerable one. It has no conscience. Napoleon is the readiest instance of this. If his heart had borne any proportion to his brain, he had been one of the greatest men of history.
  • James Russel Lowell, reported in a Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 353

• The inherent contradiction between condemning the intellect as invalid and incapable of reaching truth, and using that same intellect to make the condemnation, seems, strangely, not to occur to those who hold this derogatory view of the intellect.
  • Norah Michener, Maritain on the Nature of Man. Hull, Canada: Éditions "L'Éclair", 1955, p. 2

• We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
  • George Orwell, in a review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell in Adelphi (January 1939)

• Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
  • George Orwell, in a review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read, Poetry Quarterly (Winter 1945)

• It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.
  • George Orwell, in a letter to Richard Rees (3 March 1949)

• He told me that it isn't what you do but how you do it that shows whether you are clever or not.
  • Cesare Pavese, The moon and the bonfire, chapter XVII, p. 99

• Every thing connected with intellect is permanent.
  • William Roscoe, reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 353

• 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, "Women, the Arts, & the Politics of Culture: An Interview with Susan Sontag" in Salmagundi, No. 31-32 (Fall/Winter 1975), p. 29; later published in Conversations with Susan Sontag (1995) edited by Leland A. Poague, p. 77

• To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.
  • Cornel West, "Chekhov, Coltrane, and Democracy: Interview by David Lionel Smith." The Cornel West Reader (1998)

• Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
  • Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues (1954) 15 December 1939

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 398.

• The hand that follows intellect can achieve.
  • Michelangelo, The Artist, Longfellow's translation

• 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), Chapter II

• 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), Chapter II

• For the eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."
  • Thomas Carlyle, Varnhagen Von Ense's Memoirs, London and Westminster Review (1838)

• The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, Intellect

• 'Tis good-will makes intelligence.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Titmouse, line 65

• Works of the intellect are great only by comparison with each other.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Literary Ethics

• 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), Book I, Chapter VIII

• 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, Handsome Lawrence, Chapter II

• The march of intellect.
  • Robert Southey, Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, Volume II, p. 361

• The intellectual power, through words and things,
  Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way!
  • William Wordsworth, Excursion, Book III

• Three sleepless nights I passed in sounding on,
  Through words and things, a dim and perilous way.
  • William Wordsworth, Borderers; written eighteen years before Excursion

See also

• Artificial intelligence
• Spiritual intelligence