"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit."
— Oscar Wilde

"When you know better you do better."
— Oprah Winfrey

"He who stands for nothing will fall for anything."
— Alexander Hamilton

"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."
— Douglas Adams

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts."
— Albert Camus

"It is not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer."
— Albert Einstein

"You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant."
— Harlan Ellison

"It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners."
— Albert Camus

"Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager."
— Susan Sontag

"A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special."
— Nelson Mandela

"Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect."
— Edgar Allan Poe (Complete Tales and Poems)

"Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic."
— Aldous Huxley

"It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word."
— Andrew Jackson

""I think of myself as an intelligent, sensitive human being with the soul of a clown which always forces me to blow it at the most important moments."
"
— Jim Morrison

"A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. "
— Susan Sontag

"Beauty fades, dumb is forever."
— Judge Judy Sheindlin (Beauty Fades, Dumb is Forever)

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."
— Arthur C. Clarke

"The sum of intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing."
— Cole's Axiom

"All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office."
— Ambrose Bierce

"The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"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

"We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are."
— Stephen Jay Gould (The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History)

"You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature."
— Philip Roth (American Pastoral)

"Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has."
— Martin Luther

"The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty."
— James Madison

"Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change."
— H.G. Wells (The Time Machine)

"The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way. "
— Diane Arbus (Diane Arbus Revelations)

"A woman may possess the wisdom and chastity of Minerva, and we give no heed to her, if she has a plain face. What folly will not a pair of bright eyes make pardonable? What dullness may not red lips are sweet accents render pleasant? And so, with their usual sense of justice, ladies argue that because a woman is handsome, therefore she is a fool. O ladies, ladies! there are some of you who are neither handsome nor wise. "
— William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair)

"The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind
about nothing -- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts."
— John Keats

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough."
— Aldous Huxley

"I mean to say, I know perfectly well that I've got, roughly speaking, half the amount of brain a normal bloke ought to possess. And when a girl comes along who has about twice the regular allowance, she too often makes a bee line for me with the love light in her eyes. I don't know how to account for it, but it is so."

"It may be Nature's provision for maintaining the balance of the species, sir."
— P.G. Wodehouse

""The habits of a vigorous mind are born in contending with difficulties.""
— Abigail Adams

"I happen to feel that the degree of a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic."
— Lisa Alther

"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

"The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves."
— Norbert Wiener (The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society)

"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

"Our civilization will, of course, be "playing God" in an ultimate sense of the phrase: evolving a greater intelligence than currently exists on earth. It behooves us to be a considerate creator, wise to the world and its fragile nature, sensitive to the needs for stable footings that will prevent backsliding -- and keep that house of cards we call civilization from collapsing."
— William H. Calvin (How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now)

"We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it."
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night)

"At Childerstown High School and at college he had never led his class nor taken prizes; but, without being aware that he did, he really blamed this on his failure to work hard, or any harder than he needed to. . . . What he did not know, what Paul Bonbright, among others, showed him, was that those abilities of his that got him, without distinction but also without much exertion, through all previous lessons and examinations, were not first rate abilities handicapped by laziness, but second rate, by no degree of effort or assiduity to be made the equal of abilities like Bonbright's."
— James Gould Cozzens (The Just and the Unjust)

"The innocent supposition, entertained by most people, that even if they are not brilliant, they are not dumb, is correct only in a very relative sense."
— James Gould Cozzens (The Just and the Unjust)