An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
In the future world when computation and the things which can be constructed from it become freed how does that really change how things work? That’s a future challenge to figure out.
The essence of intelligence is skill in extracting meaning from everyday experience.
The only real sign of intelligence, is the ability to detect subtlety.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out
and remove all doubt.
and remove all doubt.
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.
The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.
Persons of genius are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom. Persons of genius are more individual than any other people-less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of molds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
The poet, the artist, the sleuth—whoever sharpens our perception tends to be anti-social; rarely “well-adjusted”, he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are.
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.
Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values.