79 Intelligence Quotes To Inspire

In an age where information is abundant and the quest for knowledge is unending, intelligence remains a cornerstone of personal and professional growth. Whether it's solving complex problems, making strategic decisions, or simply navigating through the nuances of everyday life, intelligence empowers and inspires us. We’ve curated a collection of the top 79 intelligence quotes to inspire and elevate your thinking. These quotes, drawn from diverse sources and perspectives, are sure to ignite your passion for learning and spark insightful reflections. Dive in and let the wisdom of great minds guide your journey to greater understanding and enlightenment.

1. “Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.” - Oscar Wilde

2. “It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.” - Andrew Jackson

3. “If reason ruled the world would history even exist?” - Ryszard Kapuściński

4. “It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.” - G.H. Hardy

5. “These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.” - Abigail Adams

6. “Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.” - Victor Hugo

7. “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.” - Walter Lippmann

8. “Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– 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.One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

9. “What should I do—how should I act now, this very day . . . What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.” - George Eliot (Middlemarch)

10. “The habits of a vigorous mind are born in contending with difficulties.” - Abigail Adams

11. “The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.” - Terry Pratchett

12. “Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.” - Ayn Rand

13. “He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.” - P.G. Wodehouse

14. “The man of thought who will not act is ineffective; the man of action who will not think is dangerous.” - Richard M. Nixon

15. “It's hard to decide who's truly brilliant; it's easier to see who's driven, which in the long run may be more important.” - Michael Crichton

16. “The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

17. “Always be smarter than the people who hire you.” - Lena Horne

18. “Intelligence is the capacity to know what we are doing and instinct is just instinct. The results are about the same.” - Will Cuppy

19. “A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.” - Aldous Huxley

20. “Intelligence minus purpose equals stupidity.” - Toba Beta

21. “An intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils".” - Robert Louis Stevenson

22. “He's one fry short of a Happy Meal.” - Rush Limbaugh

23. “Why are you not smarter? It's only the rich who can't afford to be smart. They're compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they can't leave. But you two. We three. We're free.” - Michael Ondaatje

24. “Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not. ” - Douglas Hofstadter

25. “I not only use all the brains that I have, but all I can borrow.” - Woodrow Wilson

26. “I expect that you must receive top marks at school, young lady."Madeleine smiled as she stirred her tea. "There are always rewards for those who state the obvious frequently and with conviction.” - Scott Westerfeld

27. “We all make mistakes, but intelligence enables us to do it on purpose.” - Will Cuppy

28. “Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.” - John Kenneth Galbraith

29. “Because there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.” - Niccolo Machiavelli

30. “Sometimes people think you’re smart if you question the status quo, if nothing else.” - Craig Ferguson

31. “With good parody, you have to be smarter that the people you’re parodying.” - Craig Ferguson

32. “Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.” - Bertrand Russell

33. “Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.” - Wilkie Collins

34. “I don't think science is hard to teach because humans aren't ready for it, or because it arose only through a fluke, or because, by and large, we don't have the brainpower to grapple with it. Instead, the enormous zest for science that I see in first-graders and the lesson from the remnant hunter-gatherers both speak eloquently: A proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us, in all times, places, and cultures. It has been the means for our survival. It is our birthright. When, through indifference, inattention, incompetence, or fear of skepticism, we discourage children from science, we are disenfranchising them, taking from them the tools needed to manage their future.” - Carl Sagan

35. “It is impossible to imagine existence void of any intelligence.” - Kedar Joshi

36. “Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they've never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military.” - Maureen Dowd

37. “When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

38. “I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

39. “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of the beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.” - Henri Poincare

40. “Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.” - Malcolm X

41. “But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.” - Muriel Barbery

42. “To prove to [her friend, Swedish diplomat Count] Gyllenborg that she was not superficial, Catherine composed an essay about herself, "so that he would see whether I knew myself or not." The next day, she wrote and handed to Gyllenborg an essay titled 'Portrait of a Fifteen-Year-Old Philosopher.' He was impressed and returned it with a dozen pages of comments, mostly favorable. "I read his remarks again and again, many times [Catherine later recalled in her memoirs]. I impressed them on my consciousness and resolved to follow his advice. In addition, there was something else surprising: one day, while conversing with me, he allowed the following sentence to slip out: 'What a pity that you will marry! I wanted to find out what he meant, but he would not tell me.” - Robert K. Massie

43. “A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.” - Tana French

44. “Crazy people are considered mad by the rest of the society only because their intelligence isn't understood.” - Wei Hui

45. “Great minds with great ideas usually share in the midst of their persecution” - Jeremy Aldana

46. “I am successful because of my brains and my guts, put together, and I don't need some fancy-ass degree from a bunch of sweater-vest-wearing pricks who haven't gotten laid since Bush Senior was president... Do you know who studies sociology? People who would rather observe life than live it.” - Erin McCarthy

47. “He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.” - Alain De Botton

48. “The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.” - W.H. Auden

49. “Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself” - Philip Roth

50. “Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I'm a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what's to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble--that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

51. “Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy," said my father as he watched the three beauties. "But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?” - Orhan Pamuk

52. “A person that has more intelligence than education always makes his own grade!” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

53. “Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence.Or insanity.” - Richard Kadrey

54. “Why is being a nerd bad? Saying I notice you’re a nerd is like saying, ‘Hey, I notice that you’d rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you’d rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Linsey Lohan. Why is that?” - John Green

55. “Technically, you don't pay me.And technically, most of what I do is "think."I...rrr. ummm.And when you get right down to it, I'm better at it than you are.-Ennesby & Captain Tagon” - Howard Tayler

56. “It is a question of cubic capacity," said he; "a man with so large a brain must have something in it.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

57. “Wealth can be created. Wit and intelligence can't.” - Nicole Williams

58. “The intelligent desire self-control; children want candy.” - Rumi

59. “No matter how smart you might appear to be later with your set of diplomas on their fine white parchment, the mistakes you made before the real lessons sunk in never fade. No matter how high you hang those official documents with their official seals and signatures, how shinning and polished the frame, your reflection in the glass will never let you forget how stupid you felt when you didn't know any better.” - Tupelo Hassman

60. “A mind is a simulation that simulates itself.” - Erol Ozan

61. “Anyone can see that an ass laden with books remains a donkey. A human being laden with the undigested results of a tussle with thoughts and books, however, still passes for wise.” - Idries Shah

62. “Mobs have passions, not brains.” - Dan Simmons

63. “Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since” - Kim Stanley Robinson

64. “But I've learned that intelligence alone doesn't mean a damned thing. Here in your university, intelligence, education, knowledge, have all become great idols. But I know now there's one thing you've all overlooked: intelligent and education that hasn't been tempered by human affection isn't worth a damn...Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love...Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis.” - Daniel Keyes

65. “I think it is the duty of all human beings, as intelligent and communicative beings, to learn all the ideas thought up before ours and use them as a means to think up new ones.” - Jonathan Culver

66. “Intelligent life on other planets? I'm not even sure there is on earth!” - Albert Einstein

67. “Imagination is but another name for super intelligence.” - Edgar Rice Burroughs

68. “[T]he more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is -- at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

69. “You can either have high specific intelligence or high general intelligence, but not both.” - Kim Stanley Robinson

70. “Clarity is a sign of intellectual energy.” - Phil Cooke

71. “Never mistake arrogance for intellect.” - D.B. Harrop

72. “It is not many things that modern psychology agress upon, but all the different approaches of psychology agrees on one thing: that people in groups become more stupid. Individually people are more intelligent, because they have to take their own responsibility, but in a group they do not have to take the same responsibility. The two basic power strategies to try to manipulate and gain control over another person are: silencing and attacking. Silencing means to not listen to, to exclude or ignore and not respect a person. Attack can both mean to attack a person directly or to try to discredit a person through lies, to ridicule a person or by spreading malicious rumours. All organizations are more or less dysfunctional. In a dysfunctional group, the members of the group play three different roles: agressor, denier and victim. The agressor is the role that attack and ridicule people, the denier never knows what is going on, there is “no body at home”, and the victim is the resultat of these two roles. It is always easier to follow a group without awareness, than to follow your own heart, to trust your own intelligence, love, truth, silence and creativity.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

73. “She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind.” - Andrea Dworkin

74. “For it was intelligence that was the thin line between endearing rapscallion and idiot bastard. - Éibhear the Contemptible” - G.A. Aiken

75. “Was it possible that perhaps the most plausible explanation was being offered by someone who anyone with an ounce of sanity would have long ago consigned to the realm of the insane?” - Tim Horvath

76. “One’s opinion should only be as strong as one’s knowledge on the matter.” - Eric Hirzel

77. “العبقري يخترق حجاب المألوف .. ويخرج من أسْر العادة .!” - مصطفى محمود

78. “Kindness is seen as weakness and intelligence worshiped, even when that intelligence allows unfathomable injustice and suffering to occur under its smart watch.” - Bryant McGill

79. “Some years ago I read a book that brought Einstein's theory of relativity down to an eighth grade level. This convinced me that any subject can be made easy. In other words, always beware of anyone who tells you a topic is above you or better left to experts. This person may, for some reason, be trying to shut you out. You CAN understand almost anything.” - Richard J. Maybury