When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea.
What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.
The sure foundations of the state are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin.
Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt
You have to like everything that you're painting. Maybe on a narrative level it seems harsh. . . but I like everything in all my paintings. It's as if you need to be less intelligent at that level.
God is not good, or wise, or intelligent anyway that we know. So, people like Maimonides in the Jewish tradition, Eboncina in the Muslim tradition, Thomas Aquinas in the Christian tradition, insisted that we couldn't even say that God existed because our concept of existence is far too limited and they would have been horrified by the ease with which we talk about God today.
One of the most tragicomic things in life is that when a man makes an imaginary thing - such as a religion - as his own flag and carries it all his life and even dies for it! An intelligent man has only one flag: Flag of reason and science!
An intelligent mind is an inquiring mind. It is not satisfied with explanation, with conclusions. Nor is it a mind that believes, because belief is again another form of conclusion.
I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.
But even though she was attractive, there was something else about her that caught his eye. She was intelligent, he could sense that right away, and confident, too, as if she were able to move through life on her own terms. To him, these were the things that really mattered. Without them, beauty was nothing.
The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
It's really nice to have someone who's intelligent and articulate to talk to about what you're doing, because it's a big part of who we are.
Journalism has become the art of "intelligent anticipation of events. "
May it not be asked of every intelligent friend to the liberties of his country, whether the power exercised in such an act as this ought not to produce great and universal alarm? Whether a rigid execution of such an act, in time past, would not have repressed that information and communication among the people which is indispensable to the just exercise of their electoral rights? And whether such an act, if made perpetual, and enforced with rigor, would not, in time to come, either destroy our free system of government, or prepare a convulsion that might prove equally fatal to it?
DECALOGUE, n. A series of commandments, ten in number - just enough to permit an intelligent selection for observance, but not enough to embarrass the choice.
As you get older, you choose friends based on not only what feels resonant and warm but if they're bringing something to your life. My women friends are incredibly intelligent. There's no posturing, no competition. Especially in Los Angeles, I see pockets of friends who are very competitive, and I think, What is the point? I would rather be alone in bed with a book than have a girlfriend who is like that.
Too often it's not the most creative guys or the smartest. Instead, it's the ones who are best at playing politics and soft-soaping their bosses. Boards don't like tough, abrasive guys.
Contented, unambitious people are all very well in their way. They form a neat, useful background for great portraits to be painted against, and they make a respectable, if not particularly intelligent, audience for the active spirits of the age to play before. I have not a word to say against contented people so long as they keep quiet.
Intelligence is something that is not just thinking, it's feeling. Ultimately, the highest reflection of intelligent life is cooperative life in which all benefit.
I call that person the most intelligent who sees the benevolence, the ascent and the ultimate goal.