Top 100 Intelligence Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

— Bertrand Russell

52. “The man who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow is uneducated the day after.”

— Newton D. Baker

53. “There is no capital more useful than intellect and wisdom, and there is no indigence more injurious than ignorance and unawareness.”

— Ali ibn Abi Talib

54. “Knowledge is the key that unlocks all the doors. You can be green-skinned with yellow polka dots and come from Mars, but if you have knowledge that people need instead of beating you, they'll beat a path to your door.”

— Ben Carson

55. “If I am able to determine the enemy’s dispositions while at the same time I conceal my own, then I can concentrate and he must divide.”

— Sun Tzu

56. “All children are born geniuses; 9,999 out of every 10,000 are swiftly, inadvertently degeniusized by grownups.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

57. “It doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.”

— Thomas Sowell

58. “Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

59. “No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.”

— L. Frank Baum

60. “Thinking is progress. Non-thinking is stagnation of the individual, organisation and the country. Thinking leads to action. Knowledge without action is useless and irrelevant. Knowledge with action, converts adversity into prosperity.”

— Abdul Kalam

61. “The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

62. “Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do.”

— Jean Piaget

63. “Great minds think for themselves.”

— Immanuel Kant

64. “The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers the most from its own limitations.”

— André Gide

65. “Looks fade. Brains don’t.”

— Eunice Kennedy Shriver

66. “The profound thinker always suspects that he is superficial.”

— Benjamin Disraeli

67. “A mind too active is no mind at all.”

— Theodore Roethke

68. “The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.”

— Henry David Thoreau

69. “The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.”

— Joseph Joubert

70. “The color of truth is gray.”

— André Gide

71. “Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

72. “Ignorance never settles a question.”

— Benjamin Disraeli

73. “Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.”

— Bertrand Russell

74. “Of course not. After all, I may be wrong.”

— Bertrand Russell

75. “Information is not knowledge.”

— Albert Einstein

76. “Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.”

— Susan Sontag

77. “It is better to have a fair intellect that is well used than a powerful one that is idle.”

— Bryant McGill

78. “Every true genius is bound to be naive.”

— Friedrich Schiller

79. “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

— George Orwell

80. “If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.”

— John F. Kennedy

81. “In school, you are given the lesson first. On the street, you’re given the mistake first and then it’s up to you to find the lesson, if you ever find it.”

— Robert T. Kiyosaki

82. “I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.”

— Abigail Adams

83. “The sage has one advantage: he is immortal. If this is not his century, many others will be.”

— Baltasar Gracián

84. “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”

— Alexander Pope

85. “One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

86. “I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.”

— Bertrand Russell

87. “Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

88. “For every studen with a spark of brilliance, there are about ten with ignition trouble.”

— Milton Berle

89. “I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.”

— Stephen King

90. “The temptation shared by all forms of intelligence: cynicism.”

— Albert Camus

91. “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

92. “There’s a heart beneath the boobs and a brain beneath the wig.”

— Dolly Parton

93. “A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

94. “I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.”

— Thomas A. Edison

95. “He that in the ordinary affairs of life would admit of nothing but direct plain demonstration would be sure of nothing in this world but of perishing quickly.”

— John Locke

96. “Intelligence in the service of poor instinct is really dangerous.”

— Gloria Steinem

97. “Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.”

— William Hazlitt

98. “The best buy by way of management is brains-at any price.”

— Malcolm S. Forbes

99. “My darkness has been filled with the light of intelligence, and behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness.”

— Helen Keller

100. “How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?”

— Larry Niven