75 Top-Notch Quotes about Intelligence

"Emotional intelligence is a master aptitude, a capacity that profoundly affects all other abilities, either facilitating or intefering with them."

Daniel Goleman (born March 7, 1946) is an author, psychologist, and science journalist. For twelve years, he wrote for The New York Times, specializing in psychology and brain sciences.


"To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues, it means taking pleasure in them."

Chinua Achebe (November 16, 1930) is a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor at Brown University and critic. He is best known for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), which is the most widely read book in modern African literature.


"Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven."

Edward de Bono (born 19 May 1933, in Malta) is a physician, author, inventor, and consultant. He is known as the originator of the term lateral thinking, wrote a best selling book Six Thinking Hats and is a proponent of the deliberate teaching of thinking as a subject in schools.


"Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible: reason distinghuises between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless."

Max Born (11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German born physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. Born won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Walther Bothe).


"It's possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated."

Aleck William Bourne (4 June 1886 – 30 December 1974) was a prominent British gynaecologist and writer who is best known for his 1938 trial, a landmark case, for performing an illegal abortion on a 14-year-old girl rape victim.


"The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them."

Sir William Henry Bragg (2 July 1862 – 10 March 1942) was a British physicist, chemist, mathematician and active sportsman who uniquely shared a Nobel Prize with his son William Lawrence Bragg - the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics.


"The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German writer and polymath. Goethe is considered by many to be the most important writer in the German language and one of the most important thinkers in Western culture. Goethe's works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, philosophy, and science. His magnum opus, lauded as one of the peaks of world literature, is the two-part drama Faust.


"While intelligent people can often simplify the complex, a fool is more likely to complicate the simpel."

Gerald W. Grummet (-)


"The man who gets the most satisfactory results is not always the man with the most brilliant single mind, but rather the man who can best coordinate the brains and talents of his associates."

Sir William Alton Jones (-)


"Questions are the creative acts of intelligence."

Francis Kingdon-Ward (6 November 1885 - 8 April 1958) was an English botanist, explorer, plant collector and author.