c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Mastering our thoughts can only be achieved after we truly understand what reality is. Thus, it is time to shatter your pre-conceived concept of reality. First, the majority of what you perceive as reality exists only in your mind, and, chances are, you spend most hours of your life in this illusion.
— Alaric Hutchinson, Living Peace
Mastery of impulse is all about self-discipline and choice. The mind is a powerful tool with which we have the ability to be in control of ourselves.
— Alaric Hutchinson, Living Peace
Have no fear. Trust in the vibrational currents of your life.
— Alaric Hutchinson, Living Peace
Illusions can and do create PHYSICAL Dis-Ease within our bodies. So it’s most important to master our thoughts, to become cognizant of what we are spending our precious mental energy on each moment of every day.
— Alaric Hutchinson, Living Peace
The Lord is perfect and patient. He knows exact when to act.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
We are sustained by spiritual fire.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
May we never forget the faithful God.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The Holy Spirit speaks sacred words.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
What God predetermine proves true!
— Lailah Gifty Akita
As much purity one has within, his external circumstances will be that much more favorable. As much impurity there is within, there will be a corresponding amount of unfavorable external circumstances.
— Dada Bhagwan
How strong is your desire to know the Saviour?
— Lailah Gifty Akita
My love for you attains immortality whenever it is touched by the thought of death
— Munia Khan
When attachment increases too much, dislike will arise.
— Dada Bhagwan
It is the nature of the circumstances to disperse. If there is attachment with the circumstance, there will be abhorrence when they get dispersed.
— Dada Bhagwan
You are powerful beyond measure! Sometimes we are too afraid of what we might become so we hold on to the story we sold ourselves. You were born chosen and blessed. When you move away from stress and worry, you can begin to cultivate the greatness within. You've gotten glimpses of what you can be because of the hand of God on your life. Let's move from sickness to success. Rewrite your story and you win!!!!
— Kierra C.T. Banks
As illusory attachment (moha) spread, one sunk deeper and deeper into the pit.
— Dada Bhagwan
When many circumstances come together, one will get food to eat. When many circumstances come together, one gets to go hungry (one will not get food to eat). One goes hungry when many more circumstances come together. A greater number of circumstances are needed for an unfavorable situation, and less for favorable situation.
— Dada Bhagwan
Egoism has arisen due to circumstances and circumstances have survived due to egoism. The one whose egoism is gone, for him circumstances are gone. Everything has come into existence because of wrong belief.
— Dada Bhagwan
God said to accept whatever circumstances that come along. Circumstance is a natural thing. In it, ‘Do this and don’t do that’- should not be there. Circumstances are a ‘scientific circumstantial evidence’ [‘Vyavasthit’]. You should ‘settle them with equanimity’.
— Dada Bhagwan
Moksha (Liberation) is to become free from gathering & dispersing of circumstances.
— Dada Bhagwan
The mind doesn’t harass you
—  your attachment-abhorrence harasses you!
Abhorrence is the cause for conflicts. God has said, ‘Do no abhorrence. If you don’t like it, ignore it’.
— Dada Bhagwan
Who is free from illusory attachment (nirmohi)? The Gnani Purush (the enlightened one). He can see flesh and bones, through and through.
— Dada Bhagwan
Causes for attachment are created at the very time abhorrence occurs. Familiarity (acquaintance) up to a certain point will result in attachment and if it reaches ‘ridge point’ & goes past further, it will result in abhorrence.
— Dada Bhagwan
What is attraction (akarshan) in this world? It is open fire and one should be aware of it. Attraction is the open fire. The root of illusory attachment (moha) is indeed attraction.
— Dada Bhagwan
At the end of all spiritual paths, there lies only a cold graveyard; the path of science is the only path that may give you something better than this!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Awake to the spiritual realities of life.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Illusory attachment (moha) is indeed what will keep on biting you until the point of your demise!
— Dada Bhagwan
Do not only believe, affirm and act the sacred words of God.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The fires of hell were seventy times hotter than the fires of the iron.
— Ruth Ahmed, When Ali Met Honour
Greed has two teachers
—  one is a cheat [a crafty person] and the other one is financial loss. When one incurs loss
Divine joy is spirit of the journey.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The wilderness is a test, whether we will walk in the ways of God.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Love is the spirit of light.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Love is ignites the light in the spirit
— Lailah Gifty Akita
What does greed mean? Greed means taking away what belongs to others.
— Dada Bhagwan
Those who have anger, they try to take control others with the heat of anger and those who do not have anger are able to take control of others with their strength of character known as sheel. Even it can take control of animals (with it’s strength)!!!
— Dada Bhagwan
Absence of Kashays (anger-pride-deceit-greed) is indeed bliss.
— Dada Bhagwan
When does one become free from all tubers (of the mind)? When one becomes free of kashayas (anger-pride-deceit-greed). Kashays (anger-pride-deceit-greed) are tubers themselves.
— Dada Bhagwan
Complete departure of kashay (anger-pride-deceit-greed) is Moksha (Liberation). At first, there is the departure of kashays and then there will be ‘that’ [Liberation].
— Dada Bhagwan
One does not see ‘what is there’ and sees ‘what is not there’, that is called moha (illusory vision).
— Dada Bhagwan
Any kind of misery there is in the worldly life
—  the cause of it is moha (illusory vision).
Moha (illusory vision) means new things keep arising, and one indeed sees new things; and he remains engrossed in them.
— Dada Bhagwan
To lose awareness of what is helpful or harmful in the worldly life is moh (Illusory vision & attachment).
— Dada Bhagwan
Egoism’s nature is not Moha (Illusory attachment). Moha’s (Illusory attachment’s) nature is egoism. Moha is the origin of egoism.
— Dada Bhagwan
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
— Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories
You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.
— Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes
Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.
— Oscar Wilde
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
It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
— C.G. Jung
I not only use all the brains that I have, but all I can borrow.
— Woodrow Wilson
The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being--forgive me--rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.
— Marie Curie
Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.
— Stefan Zweig, The Burning Secret and other stories
Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.
— Victor Hugo
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 stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
— Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
— Walter H. Cottingham
I used to think that finding the right one was about the man having a list of certain qualities. If he has them, we'd be compatible and happy. Sort of a checkmark system that was a complete failure. But I found out that a healthy relationship isn't so much about sense of humor or intelligence or attractive. It's about avoiding partners with harmful traits and personality types. And then it's about being with a good person. A good person on his own, and a good person with you. Where the space between you feels uncomplicated and happy. A good relationship is where things just work. They work because, whatever the list of qualities, whatever the reason, you happen to be really, really good together.
— Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming
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, The Brothers Karamazov
Crazy people are considered mad by the rest of the society only because their intelligence isn't understood.
— Zhou Weihui
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, The Fountainhead
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, The Crack-Up
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
— Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back
I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.
— Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
A dozen more questions occurred to me. Not to mention twenty-two possible solutions to each one, sixteen resulting hypotheses and counter-theorems, eight abstract speculations, a quadrilateral equation, two axioms, and a limerick. That's raw intelligence for you.
— Jonathan Stroud, Ptolemy's Gate
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
Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
— Groucho Marx
Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.
— Isaac Asimov
I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.
— Blaise Pascal
Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
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
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
One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so—but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other in opposite directions.
— George Carlin
The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mindabout nothing -- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.
— John Keats
Controversial' as we all know, is often a euphemism for 'interesting and intelligent.
— Kevin Smith
Madness is the acme of intelligence.
— نجيب محفوظ
You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.
— Philip Roth, American Pastoral
I have a little theory that I'd like to air here, if I may. What is it that you think makes you magicians?" More silence. Fogg was well into rhetorical-question territory now anyway. He spoke more softly. "Is it because you are intelligent? Is it because you are brave and good? Is is because you're special? Maybe. Who knows. But I'll tell you something: I think you're magicians because you're unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength. Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.
— Lev Grossman, The Magicians
Anyone who knew Violet well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was tied up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes. Violet had a real knack for inventing and building strange devices, so her brain was often filled with images of pulleys, levers, and gears, and she never wanted to be distracted by something as trivial as her hair.
— Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning
Men have called me mad; but the question is not 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. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who only dream by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the ‘light ineffable’.
— Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.
— Edgar Allan Poe
Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.
— Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
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
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
— Arthur C. Clarke
Nell," the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, "the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.
— Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
Always be smarter than the people who hire you.
— Lena Horne
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
— Walter Lippmann
I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.
— Johannes Kepler
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, Congo
The man of thought who will not act is ineffective
—  the man of action who will not think is dangerous.
Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked
— R. Buckminster Fuller
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, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.
— Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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
The habits of a vigorous mind are born in contending with difficulties.
— Abigail Adams
A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence.Or insanity.
— Richard Kadrey, Butcher Bird
Not stupid. Overly trusting, maybe, but that reflects on his lack of trustworthiness, not on your intelligence.
— Tammara Webber, Easy
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
He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy. They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would?Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.
— Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire.A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
Pooh hasn't much Brain, but he never comes to any harm. He does silly things and they turn out right. There's Owl. Owl hasn't exactly got Brain, but he Knows Things. He would know the Right Thing to Do when Surrounded by Water. There's Rabbit. He hasn't Learnt in Books, but he can always Think of a Clever Plan. There's Kanga. She isn't Clever, Kanga isn't, but she would be so anxious about Roo that she would do a Good Thing to Do without thinking about it. And then there's Eeyore. And Eeyore is so miserable anyhow that he wouldn't mind about this.
— A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
The key then to attaining this higher level of intelligence is to make our years of study qualitatively rich. We don't simply absorb information - we internalize it and make it our own by finding some way to put this knowledge to practical use.
— Robert Greene, Mastery
The most intelligent people disguise the fact that they are intelligent. Wise men do not wear nametags. The more people talk about their own skills, the more desperate they are—their work should speak for itself.
— NisiOisiN, Death Note: Another Note - The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases
Intelligence entails a strong mind, but genius entails a heart of a lion in tune with a strong mind.
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
I wonder if anyone but me realizes what goes on in that head back of your deceptively sweet face.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time. 
— George Bernard Shaw, The Irrational Knot
In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance
—  nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions
The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence.
— Lyman Bryson
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, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
Kindness is strength. Good-nature is often mistaken for virtue, and good health sometimes passes for genius. Anger blows out the lamp of the mind. In the examination of a great and important question, every one should be serene, slow-pulsed, and calm. Intelligence is not the foundation of arrogance. Insolence is not logic. Epithets are the arguments of malice.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, The Christian Religion An Enquiry
The role of genius is not to complicate the simple, but to simplify the complicated.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains.Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.
— Timothy Leary, Chaos & Cyber Culture
Creativity is the highest form of intelligence. Over time, after developing a more advanced creative brain, I started feeling that my college education was more so something to be ashamed of rather than something to be proud of.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
The hallmark of intelligence is not whether one believes in God or not, but the quality of the processes that underlie one’s beliefs.
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
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, Brave New World
The willingness to change one’s mind in the light of new evidence is a sign of rationality not weakness.
— Stuart Sutherland, Irrationality
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
Armed neutrality makes it much easier to detect hypocrisy.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
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
Imagination is but another name for super intelligence.
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
We all make mistakes, but intelligence enables us to do it on purpose.
— Will Cuppy
The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Every true genius is bound to be naive.
— Friedrich Schiller
If reason ruled the world would history even exist?
— Ryszard Kapuściński
But if one observes, one will see that the body has its own intelligence; it requires a great deal of intelligence to observe the intelligence of the body.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Flight of the Eagle
Sometimes people think you’re smart if you question the status quo, if nothing else.
— Craig Ferguson
The purpose of having the orphans study all these diverse fields was not for them to just become geniuses, but to become polymaths – meaning they would be geniuses in a wide variety of fields.
— James Morcan, The Ninth Orphan
It's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.
— Maurice Sendak, The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to Present
You seem to think you’re insignificant, but the truth is you’re so intelligent, beautiful, kind and decent, adorable. I can’t be the first person to have fallen in love with you, and I won’t be the last. But I do believe I will love you the most.
— Ai Mi, Under the Hawthorn Tree
Whoever prefers the material comforts of life over intellectual wealth is like the owner of a palace who moves into the servants’ quarters and leaves the sumptuous rooms empty.
— Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aphorisms
The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.
— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
I will not dumb myself down to make someone else more comfortable with their ignorance.
— Kelli Jae Baeli
What they might lack in intelligence, they make up for with sheer quantities of high explosive.
— Simon Morden, Theories of Flight
There's a stark difference between the words 'prodigy' and 'genius.' Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured out
—  geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered. Prodigies learn
Show Holmes a drop of water and he would deduce the existence of the Atlantic. Show it to me and I would look for a tap. That was the difference between us.
— Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk
If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee's eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?
— Frans de Waal
Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins
Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.
— George Scialabba
Infinite is a meaningless word: except – it states / The mind is capable of performing / an endless process of addition.
— Louis Zukofsky
Intelligence could be more briliant within modesty.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
— George Bernard Shaw
Intelligence, Kant reminds, is not so much a result of genius, rather it is a consequence of a determination to use it.
— Michael R. LeGault
I visualized myself pulling on my mental thinking cap, jamming it down around my ears as I had taught myself to do. It was a tall, conical wizard's model, covered with chemical equations and formulae: a cornucopia of ideas.
— Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
How pitiful is an intelligence used only to make excuses to quieten the conscience.
— Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine
He's one fry short of a Happy Meal.
— Rush Limbaugh
I am not the sharpest knife in the knife-thing.
— Jimmy Dore, Citizen Jimmy
People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
— Helen Keller
Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.
— Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind
Genius is independent of situation.
— Charles Churchill
Oh Satan you're a wily one.
— Craig Ferguson
With good parody, you have to be smarter that the people you’re parodying.
— Craig Ferguson
You should totally get implants," she said admiringly in the mirror. I shake my head. "I don't yet know what I'm going to do with my life, Diane. But I'm hoping being shaped like a barbell could only be a hindrance.
— Emma McLaughlin, The Real Real
The powers of a man's mind are directly proportioned to the quantity of coffee he drinks.
— James Mackintosh
Intuition is the highest form of intelligence, transcending all individual abilities and skills
— Sylvia Clare, Trusting Your Intuition: Rediscover Your True Self to Achieve a Richer, More Rewarding Life
The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
— W.H. Auden, Selected Essays
He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.
— Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.' 'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence.
— Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche
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
Intelligence without wisdom brings destruction.
— Erol Ozan
Intelligence is composed mostly of imagination, insight, things that have nothing to do with reason.
— Vivienne Westwood
Since the dawn of time, women have been attracted to mates with strong survival skills—like intelligence and physical prowess—because men with these qualities are more likely to bring home dinner at the end of the day.” He stuck his thumbs in the air and grinned. “Dinner equals survival, team.
— Becca Fitzpatrick
Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
— Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet
HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit
— Arthur Miller, The Crucible
A positive needs a negative to complete its cycle, as the Moon needs an embodiment of itself, the Sun, to complete the cycle of its illusory essence, the Earth. Now if the earth is in dire straits, is bombing the moon to discover whether water is ‘perceived’ in the natural stance of humans an intelligent move?
— AainaA-Ridtz
Speaking of which, about assuming you had a condom—I just meant that you, with your experience, would be prepared for responsible sex, even if it were on the fly. An intelligent man is prepared for spontaneity.
— Roberta Pearce, A Bird Without Wings
Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever.
— François de La Rochefoucauld
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 R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
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, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.
— Tom Sharpe, Wilt On High
To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity. (pg.192-193, People, Land, and Community)
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
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, Hard and Fast
It's important to be smart, but it's also important to be active with your intelligence. The more you sit around over-thinking things, the more trouble you get into.
— Alisa Valdes, The Dirty Girls Social Club
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Why, that dog is practically a Phi Beta Kappa. She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw -- I don't say she will but she can.
— Dorothy Parker
Parrots mimic their owners. Their owners consider that a sign of intelligence.
— Marty Rubin
My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
I've always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I've never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it.
— John Steinbeck, America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction
Intelligence is the capacity to know what we are doing and instinct is just instinct. The results are about the same.
— Will Cuppy, How to Attract the Wombat
One will abide, and will confess that another is nobler than he, that another is richer, more handsome, and even that he is more learned, but that another is richer in reason scarcely any will confess: Rare is he who will concede genius.
— Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings
Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality.
— Adam Gopnik
I’d been traveling in Asia long enough to know that monkeys there are nothing like their trombone-playing, tambourine-banging cousins I’d seen on TV as a kid. Free-living Asian primates possess a characteristic I found shocking and confusing the first time I saw it: self-respect. If you make the mistake of holding the gaze of a street monkey in India, Nepal, or Malaysia, you’ll find you’re facing a belligerently intelligent creature whose expression says, with a Robert DeNiro–like scowl, “What the hell are you looking at? You wanna piece of me?” Forget about putting one of these guys in a little red vest.
— Christopher  Ryan, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
It is a question of cubic capacity," said he; "a man with so large a brain must have something in it.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
Men were stupid to forget what good sleuths women could be.
— Edan Lepucki, California
...intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability 'to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly'. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if you need a new and unfamiliar VCR programmed in a hurry, you commandeer any small passing child to do it.
— Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door
I like solitude. It is when you truly hear and speak your natural, unadulterated mind, and out comes your most stupid self as well as your most intelligent self. It is when you realize who you are and the extents of the good and the evils which you are capable of.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Some molecules - ammonia, carbon dioxide, water - show up everywhere in the universe, whether life is present or not. But others pop up especially in the presence of life itself. Among the biomarkers in Earth's atmosphere are ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons from aerosol sprays, vapor from mineral solvents, escaped coolants from refrigerators and air conditioners, and smog from the burning of fossil fuels. No other way to read that list: sure signs of the absence of intelligence.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong.
— Robert Reed, Marrow
I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, "What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!
— Chaim Potok, The Chosen
It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws. We don't yet know the most fundamental laws, and we can't work out all the consequences of the laws we do know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. We can't predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain, even though we can't always calculate their consequences. I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years.
— Steven Weinberg
The experience of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral is the consequences of perception.
— Allan Lokos, Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living
The general intellectual level of South Florida is somewhere just above "functionally retarded".
— Tucker Max
There is a time for faith, Bishop, and a time for action. It would be a foolish man who stood on a battlefield and faced an army with a Bible in his hands. We are here to do the bidding of our Lord Almighty, but it is through deeds, as well as piety, that we serve Him.
— Robyn Young, Crusade
Studies show that the IQ range of most creative people is surprisingly narrow, around 120 to 130. Higher IQs can perform certain kinds of tasks better--logic, feats of memory, and so on. But if the IQ is much higher or lower than that, the window of creativity closes. Nonetheless, for some reason we believe more is better, so people yearn for tip-top IQs, and that calls for bigger memories. A fast, retentive memory is handy, but no skeleton key for survival.
— Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain
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
Sense never fails to give them that have it, Words enough tomake them understood. It too often happens in some conversations,as in Apothecary Shops, that those Pots that are Empty, or haveThings of small Value in them, are as gaudily Dress'd as those thatare full of precious Drugs.They that soar too high, often fall hard, making a low and levelDwelling preferable. The tallest Trees are most in the Power of theWinds, and Ambitious Men of the Blasts of Fortune. Buildings haveneed of a good Foundation, that lie so much exposed to theWeather.
— William Penn
Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.
— John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty
To struggle against darkness is not to blunder ignorantly; intelligence is needed to generate right action. Wisdom guides whether to act or not, and if so how. Sometimes darkness is overwhelming and intelligent action is required. Sometimes silence and inaction is required, but a silence which is the result of intelligence is different from that born of ego states such as pride, fear and laziness.
— Belsebuub
Genius, throughout history, has been found difficult to classify because it varies in amount: It's rare to find a genius in the context of the noun, but most people, if not all, have a bit of genius in them in the context of the adjective.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Lively, intelligent, and quite immature, [Emily] usually burst out with exactly the comment that summed up the situation beautifully and therefore could never in politeness be said.
— Clare B. Dunkle, The Hollow Kingdom
If human foolishness had been as carefully nurtured and cultivated as intelligence has been for centuries, perhaps it would have turned into something extremely precious.
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.
— Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World
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, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman
We proclaim human intelligence to be morally valuable per se because we are human. If we were birds, we would proclaim the ability to fly as morally valuable per se. If we were fish, we would proclaim the ability to live underwater as morally valuable per se. But apart from our obviously self-interested proclamations, there is nothing morally valuable per se about human intelligence.
— Gary L. Francione
What are wits for unless a man uses them?
— Ellis Peters, The Heretic's Apprentice
I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine. The fact is, the Time Traveler was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness. Had Filby shown the model and explained the matter in the Time Traveller's words, we should have shown him far less skepticism. For we should have perceived his motives; a pork butcher could understand Filby.
— H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Deep” to me connotes intellectual rigor, not fashionable obscurity or the unnecessarily academic.
— Alex  Payne
It was an accident that has endowed man with intelligence. He has made use of it: he invented stupidity.
— Rémy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris,: Being Selections from Promenades Philosophiques
The mother was holding a baby, had a stroller with what looked like twin girls around three, and had a five-year-old boy who was running around the shelves with a finger shoved up his nose. I considered warning him that if he fell, he would poke his brain out, but it struck me that losing intelligence was not something he was worried about.
— Eileen Cook, Unraveling Isobel
Once, in his first term, Cartwright had been bold enough to ask him why he was clever, what exercises he did to keep his brain fit. Healey had laughed."It's memory, Cartwright, old dear. Memory, the mother of the Muses... at least that's what thingummy said."
— Stephen Fry, The Liar
It is impossible to imagine existence void of any intelligence.
— Kedar Joshi