“Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence. Or insanity.”
“Not stupid. Overly trusting, maybe, but that reflects on his lack of trustworthiness, not on your intelligence.”
“It is not worth an intelligent man s time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.”
“Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l admire. A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.”
“The most intelligent people disguise the fact that they are intelligent. Wise men do not wear nametags. The more people talk about their own skills, the more desperate they are—their work should speak for itself.”
“Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, See, he is a wise man! Is it not so?”
“He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy. They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back? Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn t prove his intelligence, what would? Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal. Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.”
“Pooh hasn t much Brain, but he never comes to any harm. He does silly things and they turn out right. There s Owl. Owl hasn t exactly got Brain, but he Knows Things. He would know the Right Thing to Do when Surrounded by Water. There s Rabbit. He hasn t Learnt in Books, but he can always Think of a Clever Plan. There s Kanga. She isn t Clever, Kanga isn t, but she would be so anxious about Roo that she would do a Good Thing to Do without thinking about it. And then there s Eeyore. And Eeyore is so miserable anyhow that he wouldn t mind about this.”
“An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. ”
“The key then to attaining this higher level of intelligence is to make our years of study qualitatively rich. We don t simply absorb information - we internalize it and make it our own by finding some way to put this knowledge to practical use.”
“A knavish speech sleeps in a fool s ear.”
“I wonder if anyone but me realizes what goes on in that head back of your deceptively sweet face.”
“In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.”
“[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time. ”
“You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.”
“Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one s own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.”
“Intelligence alone is not nearly enough when it comes to acting wisely.”