“It s important to be smart, but it s also important to be active with your intelligence. The more you sit around over-thinking things, the more trouble you get into.”
“Parrots mimic their owners. Their owners consider that a sign of intelligence.”
“Why, that dog is practically a Phi Beta Kappa. She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw -- I don t say she will but she can.”
“My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.”
“Share your love, share you happiness, care for others; your wealth will be endless.”
“The Christian does not avoid sin to achieve salvation, but rather salvation brings him to a desire not to sin. The closer that one s spirit is synchronized with the holy knowledge of God, the more he comprehends how and why sin is destructive to himself and others in each and every circumstance. The dwindling desire for sin is a premature gift of Heaven - where there will be no sin, where all will, too, possess that full and complete wisdom; all will have perfect reasons not to sin. In this way, free will might still exist, but the shared wisdom of God will simply outwit all desires, impulses, and needs to sin.”
“I ve always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I ve never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it.”
“Intelligence is the capacity to know what we are doing and instinct is just instinct. The results are about the same.”
“But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a one-at-a-time order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such an intelligence is right to hand in our own thoughtlessly ordered bodies. For the Tao does not know how it produces the universe just as we do not know how we construct our brains.”
“Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality.”
“The secret of happiness is love and secret of love is nonjudgmental care.”
“One will abide, and will confess that another is nobler than he, that another is richer, more handsome, and even that he is more learned, but that another is richer in reason scarcely any will confess: Rare is he who will concede genius.”
“Of all the major religions, or lack thereof, the atheist s is one of the best pretenders: his foundation for all existences, as well as moral behaviors for the permanent good of mankind, begins at science but ends at himself, the Napoleon complex of both intelligence and imagination. On the other hand the anti-theist wouldn t survive without a deity beyond himself to hunt. He doesn t pretend, he simply nullifies his own position.”
“I’d been traveling in Asia long enough to know that monkeys there are nothing like their trombone-playing, tambourine-banging cousins I’d seen on TV as a kid. Free-living Asian primates possess a characteristic I found shocking and confusing the first time I saw it: self-respect. If you make the mistake of holding the gaze of a street monkey in India, Nepal, or Malaysia, you’ll find you’re facing a belligerently intelligent creature whose expression says, with a Robert DeNiro–like scowl, “What the hell are you looking at? You wanna piece of me?” Forget about putting one of these guys in a little red vest.”
“Men were stupid to forget what good sleuths women could be.”
“In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.”
“Some molecules - ammonia, carbon dioxide, water - show up everywhere in the universe, whether life is present or not. But others pop up especially in the presence of life itself. Among the biomarkers in Earth s atmosphere are ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons from aerosol sprays, vapor from mineral solvents, escaped coolants from refrigerators and air conditioners, and smog from the burning of fossil fuels. No other way to read that list: sure signs of the absence of intelligence.”