101 Best Intelligence Quotes By Really Smart People

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If you are looking for an incredible selection of intelligence quotes you’re in the right place.

In this post we have collated the best intelligence quotes by some of the smartest people to inspire you.

Being intelligent can help you in many aspects of life.

It can also help you to see things from a different perspective.

Intelligence is something that can be developed over time if we have a passion for learning.

This collection of quotes about intelligence will help you to think deeper about certain situations and problems.

Share this list of intelligence quotes with your friends, family, and loved ones.

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Right, lets jump into this list of intelligence quotes.

Contents show

Top 10 Intelligence Quotes

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
Salvador Dali

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
Charles Bukowski

Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.
Alan Alda

Only great minds can afford a simple style.
Stendhal

Wise thinkers prevail everywhere.
Sophocles

You have to be smart. The easy days are over.
Robert Kiyosaki

Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.
Zig Ziglar

The higher the voice the smaller the intellect.
Ernest Newman

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.
Tom Robbins

Genius is the ability to renew one’s emotions in daily experience.
Paul Cezanne

More Intelligence Quotes

Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation. Walter Cronkite

I don’t know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn’t make you happy.
J.D. Salinger

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

There is no such thing as Intelligence; one has intelligence of this or that. One must have intelligence only for what one is doing. Edgar Degas

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in. Isaac Asimov

Action is the real measure of intelligence.
Napoleon Hill

Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships. Michael Jordan

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better. Maya Angelou

There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder. Ronald Reagan

A sign of intelligence is an awareness of one’s own ignorance.
Niccolo Machiavelli

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking. George S. Patton

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change. Stephen Hawking

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

Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.
Victor Hugo

There are only two races on this planet, the intelligent and the stupid. John Fowles

Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use. Andrea Dworkin

Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good. Bertolt Brecht

The intellect is always fooled by the heart.
Francois de la Rochefoucauld

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

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being. Simone Weil

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows. Dwight D. Eisenhower

Intelligence must follow faith, never precede it, and never destroy it.
Thomas a Kempis

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one. E. B. White

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

Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do: when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation. Jean Piaget

Your intelligence is measured by those around you; if you spend your days with idiots you seal your own fate.
Mary M. Illigassch

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Human intelligence may not be the best trick nature has to offer. Bryant H. McGill

A small mind is obstinate. A great mind can lead and be led. Alexander Cannon

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.
Marie Curie

The sign of an intelligent people is their ability to control their emotions by the application of reason. Marya Mannes

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

Genius is talent set on fire by courage. Henry Van Dyke

Advice to intellectuals: let noone represent you.
Theodor W. Adorno

Genius is initiative on fire. Holbrook Jackson

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings. Walter H. Cottingham

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

Inspirational Intelligence Quotes

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training. Anna Freud

Intelligence is the art of good guesswork.
H. B. Barlow

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

People are smarter than you might think. John Astin

The intellect of the wise is like glass; it admits the light of heaven and reflects it. Augustus Hare

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift

Crazy people are considered mad by the rest of the society only because their intelligence isn’t understood. Wei Hui

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence. J. Krishnamurti

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

Intelligence is enormously sexy.
Frank Langella

I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will. Antonio Gramsci

It takes a lot of things to prove you are smart, but only one thing to prove you are ignorant. Don Herold

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers. Emile M. Cioran

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
Sigmund Freud

The intelligence is proved not by ease of learning, but by understanding what we learn.Joseph Whitney

The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure. Laurence J. Peter

The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong. Robert Reed

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary. Blaise Pascal

Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools. Henri Bergson

The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers most from its own limitations. Andre Gide

There is no greater evidence of superior intelligence than to be surprised at nothing.
Josh Billings

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 Nietzsche

Education is no substitute for intelligence. Frank Herbert

Wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked. Steve Wozniak

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
George Santayana

The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence. Jean Baudrillard

The intelligent man is one who has successfully fulfilled many accomplishments, and is yet willing to learn more. Ed Parker

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Intelligence forbids tears.
Dorris Lessing

There is no great genius without some touch of madness. Aristotle

Motivational Intelligence Quotes

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

Remember to be as smart as you are.
Judd Nelson

To think is to practice brain chemistry. Deepak Chopra

Be smarter than other people, just don’t tell them so.H. Jackson Brown

You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace. Frank McCourt

It is better to have a fair intellect that is well used than a powerful one that is idle.
Bryant H. McGill

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. Saul Bellow

It is one thing to be clever and another to be wise. George R.R. Martin

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. Susan Sontag

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.
Henry Ford

Intelligence, in diapers, is invisible. And when it matures, out the window it flies. We have to pounce on it earlier.Stanislaw J. Lec

Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people. Eleanor Roosevelt

Your intelligence is measured by those around you; if you spend your days with idiots you seal your own fate. Mary M. Illigassch

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
Alfred N. Whitehead

An intelligence test sometimes shows a man how smart he would have been not to have taken it. Laurence J. Peter

The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all. Oscar Wilde

The difference between intelligence and education is this: intelligence will make you a good living. Charles F. Kettering

One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
Lewis Mumford

Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done. Linus Torvalds

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous. Carl Sagan

Intelligence is a moral category. Theodor Adorno

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
Albert Einstein

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well. Rene Descartes

To Sum Up

Hopefully you have enjoyed this big list of intelligence quotes.

There are lots to motivate and inspire you every day.

I’d love to know which intelligence quotes are your favourites.

Drop them in the comments below.