Top 200 Intelligent Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

152. “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

153. “Cash combined with courage in a time of crisis is priceless.”

— Warren Buffett

154. “Education is the great engine to personal development.”

— Nelson Mandela

155. “An intelligent person is never afraid or ashamed to find errors in his understanding of things.”

— Bryant McGill

156. “If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.”

— Colin Powell

157. “With a wonderful business, you can figure out what will happen; you can’t figure out when it will happen. You don’t want to focus on when, you want to focus on what. If you’re right about what, you don’t have to worry about when.”

— Warren Buffett

158. “It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”

— Henry David Thoreau

159. “Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

160. “Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.”

— Thomas A. Edison

161. “The brighter you are, the more you have to learn.”

— Don Herold

162. “Knowing others is wisdom; Knowing the self is enlightenment. Mastering others requires force; Mastering the self requires strength; He who knows he has enough is rich. Perseverance is a sign of will power.”

— Lao Tzu

163. “Perhaps we’ve never been visited by aliens because they have looked upon Earth and decided there’s no sign of intelligent life.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

164. “The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

165. “Investing is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.”

— Benjamin Graham

166. “It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool’s paradise.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

167. “If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”

— C. S. Lewis

168. “They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it’s not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.”

— Terry Pratchett

169. “We are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.”

— Terence McKenna

170. “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”

— T. S. Eliot

171. “Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.”

— Charlie Munger

172. “As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.”

— Benjamin Disraeli

173. “Nobody ever mastered any skill except through intensive, persistent and intelligent practice.”

— Norman Vincent Peale

174. “Vocabulary enables us to interpret and to express. If you have a limited vocabulary, you will also have a limited vision and a limited future.”

— Jim Rohn

175. “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”

— Epictetus

176. “The intelligent desire self-control; children want candy.”

— Rumi

177. “In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.”

— George Orwell

178. “There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.”

— John F. Kennedy

179. “Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

180. “I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

181. “I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too intelligent to come here.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

182. “Intelligent planning is essential for success in any undertaking designed to accumulate riches.”

— Napoleon Hill

183. “The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.”

— Khalil Gibran

184. “You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.”

— Albert Camus

185. “People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.”

— Carl Sagan

186. “Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.”

— Voltaire

187. “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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

— George Orwell

189. “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”

— George Orwell

190. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m in my right mind. Then it passes off and I’m as intelligent as ever.”

— Samuel Beckett

191. “The zionist argument to justify Israel’s present occupation of Arab Palestine has no intelligent or legal basis in history.”

— Malcolm X

192. “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

— William Shakespeare

193. “The intelligent investor should recognize that market panics can create great prices for good companies and good prices for great companies.”

— Benjamin Graham

194. “The happiest people spend much time in a state of flow – the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

195. “There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.”

— Napoleon Hill

196. “A journey of 1000 miles begins with one step.”

— Laozi

197. “No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”

— Victor Hugo

198. “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”

— Henry David Thoreau

199. “You are what you think.”

— Ben Carson

200. “Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true.”

— Napoleon Hill