#gen

Intelligent people know they are intelligent. They also know that one person cannot know all, hence a person is not stupid simply because he is ignorant of one thing or another. They know that, to another intelligent person, they will not appear stupid in asking for an explanation of what they do not know, and so their ignorance on any particular issue does not become an embarrassment. ↗

— Lynsay Sands

#stupid #stupidity #intelligence

I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they just wanted to steal some money, it was nothing personal. That's the way of the world. It made me mad, but it didn't make me feel stupid. If anything, it flattered my intelligence. Accepting all that kindness, though, made me feel stupid. Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don't burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people's psychic hearts. ↗

— Rob Sheffield

#grief #kindness #intelligence

We now understand that higher-level thinking is more likely to occur in the brain of a student who is emotionally secure than in the brain of a student who is scared, upset, anxious, or stressed. ↗

— Mawhinney and Sagan

#emotions #learning #stress #teaching #understanding

That's a movie quote, right? You know, if you do that with books, people think you're intelligent." Sophie lowered her chin. "If this is your pathetic attempt to seduce me again, you're falling miserably." "I don't seduce woman." Phin shoved back his chair and stood up. "They fall into my open arms." "Clumsy of them. ↗

— Jennifer Crusie

#intelligence

I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information. ↗

— Studs Terkel

#american #american people #books #decency #deep

'Tis easier for the generous to forgive, than for offence to ask it. ↗

— James Thomson

#easier #forgive #generous #offence #than

For 37 years I've practiced 14 hours a day, and now they call me a genius. ↗

— Pablo de Sarasate

#day #genius #hours #i #me

A gentleman would be ashamed should his deeds not match his words. ↗

— Kong Fu Zi

#deeds #gentleman #his #match #should

The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that difference is and how reality can be constructed so differently. ↗

— David Eagleman

#based #behavioural #change #constructed #difference

Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#infinite #into #out