Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.
It means, "If you're not strong, you'd better be smart."
Starlight, stay trim and keep your mind in trim too.
Intelligence is not a privilege, it's a gift. And you use it for the good of mankind.
— Secret agent 0014.
— Why 0014?
— Cause I'm twice as smart as 007.
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are!
Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of that. He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence.
Intelligence is a very valuable thing, innit, my friend? And usually it comes far too fucking late.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.