I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.

Intelligent people tend to have less friends than the average person. The smarter you are, the more selective you become.

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

In walking, the will and the muscles are so accustomed to working together and performing their task with so little expenditure of force that the intellect is left comparatively free.

The first method of estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

Bless a thing and it will bless you. Curse it and it will curse you. . . If you bless a situation, it has no power to hurt you, and even if it is troublesome for a time, it will gradually fade out, if you sincerely bless it.

Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.

To make a contented slave it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken the moral and mental vision and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.

I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.