There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the induction of a new order of things.
A sign of intelligence is an awareness of one's own ignorance.
- Topic: Intelligence
- Location: Arches National Park
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from Niccolo Machiavelli
From this arises the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both: but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.
Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.
The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
The first method of estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.
More Quotes from Arches National Park
More on Intelligence
Intelligent people tend to have less friends than the average person. The smarter you are, the more selective you become.
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.
It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.
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.
I have always regarded that Constitution as the most remarkable work known to me in modern times to have been produced by the human intellect, at a single stroke (so to speak), in its application to political affairs.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
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.
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.