Everyone is smart to some degree.  We each all have our own special talents along with different intellectual abilities.  But what makes a person intelligent, smart, captivating, and even genius?

Each individual view of who or what is an intelligent being is different.  What is smart to one person, may seem completely ridiculous to others.  Intelligence is in the eye of the beholder.

If you want to have a better grasp about intellect and emotional intelligence than you need to read these famous quotes about intelligence!

Quotes About Intelligence

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better

Maya Angelou

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends

Friedrich Neitzsche

The measure of intelligence is the ability to change

Albert Einstein

It is not that I’m so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer

Albert Einstein

You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace

Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently

Fyodor Dostoysvsky, Crime and Punishment

A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special

Nelson Mandela

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong

Carl Gustav Jung

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence

J. Krishnam urti

I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day

Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

It is one thing to be clever and another to be wise

George R.R. Martin

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

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

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 Zweir, The Burning Secret and Other Stories

Education is no substitute for intelligence

Frank Herbert

Crazy people are considered mad by the rest of the society only because their intelligence isn’t understood

Wi Hui

You never know how truly lonely you are in the word till you finally find someone who you can match intelligence with

devouringwords.com

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 Foutainhead

Beauty fades, dumb is forever

Judge Judy Sheindlin, Beauty Fades, Dumb is Forever

I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise

Blaise Pascal

Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage

Isaac Asimov

I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am

Carmac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence

Edgar Allan Poe

I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible

Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends

Madness is the acme of intelligence

Naguib Mahfouz

Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person

Immanuel kant

Man is a genius when he is dreaming

Akira Kurosawa

The weak are dominated by their ego, the wise dominate their ego, and the intelligent are in a constant struggle against their ego

Hamza Yusuf

Intelligence is not measured by how much you know, but by how much you have the capacity to learn

Francesca Zappia, Made You Up