Quotes about Intelligence

The singular magic of a place is evident from what happens there, from what befalls oneself or others when in its vicinity. The songs proper to a specific site will share a common style, a rhythm that matches the pulse of the place, attuned to the way things happen there – to the sharpness of the shadows or the rippling speech of water bubbling up from the ground. In traditional Ireland, a country person might journey to one distant spring in order to cure her insomnia, to another for strengthening her ailing eyesight, and to yet another to receive insight and protection from thieves. For each spring has its own powers, its own blessings, and its own curses. Different gods dwell in different places, and different demons. Each place has its own dynamism, its own patterns of movement, and these patterns engage the senses and relate them in particular ways, instilling particular moods and modes of awareness, so that unlettered, oral people will rightly say that each place has its own mind, its own personality, its own intelligence.

True intelligence does not derive from thought.  True intelligence uses thought.

Love is the highest form of intelligence we can experience.

People turn over their lives to spiritual work to try to escape, and want all their problems to go away, be solved; but spiritual life is hard and takes all your effort. Keep your intelligence about you.

True intelligence is the capacity of the mind to honor the wisdom of the heart.

In our society, confidence leads to knowledge - which leads to power - which leads to pride - which leads to a fear of seeming ignorant - which constricts learning like an iron vice.  We must understand that confidence is a blessing, for it is the embodiment of self-love, and through it we find the fuel for innovation and progress.  We must realize that ignorance is merely the opportunity to learn more.  And lastly, we must marvel rather than groan at the fact that there will always be more to learn...
Only then will we be free of the intellectual prisons we have so readily caged ourselves within.

The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.

I believe in the theory of evolution, but I believe as well in the allegorical truth of creation theory. In other words, I believe that evolution, including the principle of natural selection, is one of the tools used by God to create mankind. Mankind is then a participant in the creation of the universe itself, so that we have a closed loop. I believe that there is a level on which science and religious metaphor are mutually compatible.

It is impossible to imagine existence void of any intelligence.

If the hole we've dug ourselves into is consumerism, it doesn't particularly help that your shovel is a fashionable shade of green.

As Kierkegaard insisted from his theistic perspective, so Nietzsche also argues from his naturalistic one: whoever accepts the whole must accept as well the negative, resented, embittering, contrary elements in that whole. If life and character and nature and society truly are wholes, then everything in them is in some way essential to that whole; and we cannot grasp that whole by means of value-judgments if values are INHERENTLY DISCRIMINATORY or divisive functions of our intelligence. Values drive rifts between options, they exist for the sake of the natural powers of the will which (so to speak) needs its food cut up into willable portions or differentiated options.

Do you begin to understand the mischief that self-uncritical democratist opinionizing has wrought, all across the cultural universe? NONE of our political rhetoric and religious and moral and other usages can afford to be taken at face value; all deserve to be scrutinized, to be hammered and tested as heartlessly as is rationally possible. The hard labors that our whole culture has NOT done in self-testing itself for us, WE must do as self-critical and acute individuals. Just as with our genome, so too with our noosphere: there is an overwhelming mass of non-functional or dysfunctional genetic detritus cluttering up our so-called minds. The "discriminating" intelligence by which this stuff might have gotten screened has been given a bad name (elitist, if not racist and sexist) by the psycho-social pressure groups that define the "politics of identity" (i.e. which particular segment of self-enclosing idiotists do you most immediately identify with).

The most intelligent person is one who humbly accepts the ideas of others, and not their own

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.

If God is willing to prevent evil, but is not able to

 Then he is not omnipotent.

If he is able, but not willing

 Then he is malevolent.

If he is both able and willing

 Then whence cometh evil?

If he is neither able nor willing

 Then why call him God?

You can't have real learning with a child unless they are playing. Real playing is how real learning takes place. You can have conditioning and a Pavlovian conditioning of his dogs, or behaviors modifications through other means which we look on as very serious, and we generally call learning, but it's not learning. It's conditioning. Real learning takes place by what Maria Montesorri would call the absorbent mind of the child. Simply absorbing their universe, absorbing it, becoming it, and they do this through play. Play can be the most serious undertaking of a child's life. It is the most serious undertaking. They are completely entrained in play. Mind, the three parts of the mind; thought, feeling, action, the body, every aspect of the child's self entrained solely focuses totally on the activity of absorbing their world. Absorbing their environment. It is the most serious active to their life because they're literally building their construction of knowledge of the world, of themselves, of the relationship between the two and laying down all the foundations for the later forms of intelligence.

Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.
Knowledge is not intelligence.
In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected.
Change alone is unchanging.
The same road goes both up and down.
The beginning of a circle is also its end.
Not I, but the world says it: all is one.
And yet everything comes in season.  

Intelligence may control the mechanism of civilization,
wisdom may direct it, but spiritual idealism is the
energy which really uplifts and advances human
culture from one level of attainment to another.

The pretense that humans are superior to nonhumans is entirely unsupportable.  I have seen no compelling evidence that humans are particularly more "intelligent" than any other creature.  I have had long and fruitful relationshis with many nonhuman animals, both domesticated and wild, and have reveled in the bouquet of radically different intelligences - different forms, not different "quantities" that they have introduced to me, each in his or her own time, in his or her own way.
Similarly, I have seen no evidence that animals do not plan, do not remember, do not hold grudges, do not squabble, do not have communities, do not grieve, do not feel joy, do not play games, do not make jokes, do not enjoy challenges, do not have fun, do not have morals, do not feel or think so many of the things that are so arrogantly deemed to be human traits.  Indeed, I have seen all of these "human" traits in nonhuman animals.

Love is the highest form of intelligence, and we share this unsurpassed gift with many other species.

I subscribe to Hellenic existential values, which is to say, nothing is truly "understood" in any penetrating or rational way until it has been traced back to its implications for ultimate values. Moralizing in the most profound and synoptic way should be the primary challenge for modern philosophers, a way of recovering the kind of articulated value-intelligence that ancient culture exercised. For most moderns there are no such things as foundational values or principles; there are only feelings, vagrant or idiosyncratic emotionalisms. To "think" in a merely abstract or conceptualizing way, free of the tasks of connoisseurial and spiritual evaluation, is in truth already a form of delusionality just in itself: it is the error that Kant describes of a bird realizing how much resistance the wind causes for it, and imagining that if only it were in empty space it could fly ever so much better. Hegel's understanding of the task of philosophy "in medias res"--having to come to see and understand not in a hypothetical vacuum or laboratory conditions in vitro but amidst the turbulence and conflicts of actual historical existence--is the only ultimately sane, rational, and humanly responsible method.

The future belongs to those who understand that doing more with less is compassionate, prosperous and enduring, and thus more intelligent, even competetive.

Evolution made civilization steward of this planet.  A hundred thousand years later, the steward stood before evolution not helper but destroyer, not healer but parasite.  So evolution withdrew its gift, passed civilization by, rescued the planet from intelligence and handed it to love.

Human cultures progress through a dance of specialization and integration.  The problem is that the human trait of abstract thinking has allowed our ability to specialize to outpace our ability to integrate knowledge.  Thus, we know more and more details about nothing particularly relevant.  Life becomes a game of trivia played between people who don't have an intrinsic understanding of who, or what, they are and who have little idea how larger social, scientific and cultural systems operate. 

All the "freedom" in the world can not solve this problem, but rather leads to greater confusion.  Lack of freedom throws us into panick and again causes confusion.  We often seek grounding in religion or political movements, but the price of suspending our disbelief is our relinquishment of authority to others no more qualified than the rest of us.  We can not afford, in our globalized, interdependent world, to turn over our otherwise intelligent minds to ideologies and theologies.  We can not afford the divisiveness and arrogance inherent when one believes that theirs is the only way, the "right" way, and that other paths are "evil" or inferior even if they work very well.

If we declare our race to be HUMAN, our religion to be KINDNESS and our nature to be A WONDERFUL SPECIES OF PRIMATES, we will gradually learn to exercise rational control over our minds, our culture and our planet.

You are never a great man if you have more mind than heart

The human MIND seems to work best in the presence of reality.

The brain that contains the problem
probably also contains the solution.

IF the conditions are right, the huge intelligence of the human being surfaces. IDEAS seem to come from nowhere & sometimes STUN US.

So it's worth pondering that this whole system, which we are calling 'thought', works as a system of reflexes.  The question is: can you become aware of the reflex character of thought--that it is a reflex, that it is a whole system of reflexes which is constantly capable of being modified, added to, changed?  And we could say that as long as the reflexes are free to change then there must be some kind of intelligence or perception, something a bit beyond the reflex, which would be able to see whether it's coherent or not.  But when it gets conditioned too strongly it may resist that perception; it may not allow it.

Born alone to escape thoughts conceived within a dying star.

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.

Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.