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.
Even the greatest fool can accomplish a task if it be after his heart. But the intelligent man is he who can convert every work into one that suits his taste. No work is petty. Everything in this world is like a banyan seed, which, though appearing tiny as a mustard seed, has yet the gigantic banyan tree latent with it. He indeed is intelligent who notices this and succeeds in making all work truly great.
The kinder and more intelligent a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people. Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy and dull things become cheerful.
I'm grateful to be an American. I am grateful that we can be angry at the terrorist assault and at the same time be intelligent enough not to hold a grudge against every Arab and every Muslim.
If you have more than 120 or 130 I.Q. points, you can afford to give the rest away. You don't need extraordinary intelligence to succeed as an investor.
I only write to understand myself better... I don't try to show how intelligent or how cultivated I am, I just try to share my soul. Sharing is part of life.
Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.
Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, and imagination the soul that is everywhere and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.
It has always been my opinion since I first possessed such a thing as an opinion, that the man who knows only one subject is next tiresome to the man who knows no subject. Therefore, in the course of my life I have taught myself whatever I could, and although I am not an educated man, I am able, I am thankful to say, to have an intelligent interest in most things.
There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.
Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confession of insanities would come up!
I came to realize that I was always looking for myself in the women I loved. I looked at their lovely, clean faces, and saw myself reflected in them. They, on the other hand, looked at me and saw the dirt on my face and, however intelligent and self confident they were, they ended up seeing themselves reflected in me and thinking that they were worse than they were. Please don't let that happen to you.
A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, or in the realm of intuitions and duty.
How often have I not heard a perfectly intelligent female says, in the tone of one clinching an argument, 'Edgar says -- ' And all the time you are perfectly aware that Edgar is a perfect fool.