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"There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea."
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"There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea."

"It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value."

"The Clinton White House today said they would start to give national security and intelligence briefings to George Bush. I don't know how well this is working out. Today after the first one Bush said, 'I've got one question: What color is the red phone?'"

"Solving a problem is intelligence. Preventing a problem is wisdom."

"Most unintelligent or foolish people do not regard themselves as that, they regard themselves as not-that-intelligent or not-that-wise."

"No, honestly, my mouth shouldn't be able to function unless my brain's engaged."

"One might almost define intelligence as the level at which an aware organism demands, 'What's in it for me?"

"Were you born stupid, Heinrich, or did you have to study?"

"Intelligence arouses fear and respect, the lack of it keeps one on the narrow minded road of disrespect, stupidity and inferiority complex."

"Once intelligent beings achieve technology and the capacity for self-destruction of their species, the selective advantage of intelligence becomes more uncertain."
Explore more quotes by Virginia Woolf


"A woman, she had provoked this horror; a woman, she shouldh ave known how to deal with it. It was immesley to her discredit, sexually, to stand there dumb. One said - what did one say? - Oh, Mr. Ramsay! Dear Mr. Ramsay! That was what that kind old lady who sketched, Mrs. Beckwith, would have said instantly, and rightly. But, no. They stood there, isolated from the rest of the world. His immesnse self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and and spread itself in pools at her feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet."


"How then did it work out, this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?"


"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."


"He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn't, she answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did."


"Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion -writing- only the wrong side of the carpet."


"If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?"


"Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table-it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket-that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep."


"Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes."


"No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion."
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