Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Louis Bromfield

As soils are depleted, human health, vitality and intelligence to go with them.

Health | Intelligence | Wisdom |

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

To me there is something thrilling and exalting in the thought that we are drifting forward into a splendid mystery - into something that no mortal eye hath yet seen, and no intelligence has yet declared.

Intelligence | Mortal | Mystery | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |

George William Curtis

Progress begins with the minority. It is completed by persuading the majority, by showing the reason and the advantage of the step forward, and that is accomplished by appealing to the intelligence of the majority.

Intelligence | Majority | Progress | Reason | Wisdom |

John Dewey

For the highest task of intelligence is to grasp and recognize genuine opportunity, possibility.

Intelligence | Opportunity | Wisdom |

John Dewey

We are weak today in ideal matters because intelligence is divorced from aspiration. The bare force of circumstance compels us onwards in the daily detail of our beliefs and acts, but our deeper thoughts and desires turn backwards. When philosophy shall have co-operated with the course of events and made clear and coherent the meaning of the daily detail, science and emotion will interpenetrate, practice and imagination will embrace. Poetry and religious feeling will be the unforced flowers of life. To further this articulation and revelation of the meanings of the current course of events is the task and problem of philosophy in days of transition.

Aspiration | Events | Force | Imagination | Intelligence | Life | Life | Meaning | Philosophy | Poetry | Practice | Revelation | Science | Will | Wisdom | Circumstance |

F. Scott Fitzgerald, fully Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Ability | Example | Ideas | Intelligence | Mind | Time | Wisdom |

F. Scott Fitzgerald, fully Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Ability | Example | Ideas | Intelligence | Mind | Time | Wisdom |

Edward Everett

Beneath a free government there is nothing but the intelligence of the people to keep the people’s peace. Order must be preserved, not by a military police or regiments of horse-guards, but by the spontaneous concert of a well-informed population, resolved that the rights which have been rescued from despotism shall not be subverted by anarchy.

Anarchy | Government | Intelligence | Nothing | Order | Peace | People | Rights | Wisdom | Government |

Howard Gardner, fully Howard Earl Gardner

In the conventional [intelligence] test, the child is confronted by an adult who fires at him a rapid series of questions. The child is expected to give a single answer (or, when somewhat older, to write down his answer or to select it from a set of choices). A premium is placed on linguistic facility, on certain logical-mathematical abilities, and on a kind of social skill at negotiating the situation with an elder in one's presence. These factors can all intrude when one is trying to assess another kind of intelligence -- say, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, or spatial.

Intelligence | Skill | Wisdom | Child |

William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

Man is not an organism; he is an intelligence served by organs.

Intelligence | Man | Wisdom |

William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

An instinct is an agent which performs blindly and ignorantly a work of intelligence and knowledge.

Instinct | Intelligence | Knowledge | Wisdom | Work |

Raymond Holliwell

God does not require you to follow His leading on blind trust. Behold the evidence of an invisible intelligence pervading everything, even you own mind and body.

Body | Evidence | God | Intelligence | Mind | Trust | Wisdom |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Intelligence | Man | Servitude | Wisdom |

Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

For estimating the intelligence of a ruler... look at the men around him.

Intelligence | Men | Wisdom |

Thomas Otway

Silence is the ecstatic bliss of souls, that by intelligence converse.

Intelligence | Silence | Wisdom |

William Shenstone

The best time to frame an answer to the letters of a friend is the moment you receive them; then the warmth of friendship and the intelligence received most forcibly co-operate.

Friend | Intelligence | Receive | Time | Wisdom | Friendship |