| Quote | Author | Source | Email Quote |
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| You quote an isolated sentence from my lecture, and appear to have some difficulty in understanding it. I should have thought that only a sub-human intelligence could have failed to grasp the point, but if it really needs amplification I shall consent to see you at the hour named . . . | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Lost World |  |
| "This affair must all be unravelled from within." He tapped his forehead. "These little grey cells. It is 'up to them'--as you say over here." | Agatha Christie | The Mysterious Affair at Styles | |
| "I don't profess to be profound; but I do lay claim to common sense." | Charles Dickens | David Copperfield | |
| Little things affect little minds. | Benjamin Disraeli | Sybil | |
| "The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority." | Henrik Ibsen | An Enemy of the People | |
| But the dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end. | Sir Max Beerbohm | Zuleika Dobson | |
| "It's the people who try to be clever who never are; the people who are clever never think of trying to be." | Gilbert Parker | The Battle Of The Strong | |
| I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs,-- give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only contains lifeless albumen. | Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. | The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table | |
| "It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble." | H. G. Wells | The Time Machine | |
| "Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change." | H. G. Wells | The Time Machine | |
| Flippancy, the most hopeless form of intellectual vice . . . | George Gissing | New Grub Street | |
| "I feel that there is reason lurking in you somewhere, so we will patiently grope round for it." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Lost World | |
| What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts. | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Stark Munro Letters | |
| . . . always the dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits. | William Shakespeare | As You Like It | |
| "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it - there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | A Study in Scarlet | |
| "How dreadful!" cried Lord Henry. "I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect." | Oscar Wilde | The Picture of Dorian Gray | |
| Some eighty thousand years are supposed to have existed between paleolithic and neolithic man. Yet in all that time he only learned to grind his flint stones instead of chipping them. But within our father's lives what changes have there not been? The railway and the telegraph, chloroform and applied electricity. Ten years now go further than a thousand then, not so much on account of our finer intellects as because the light we have shows us the way to more. Primeval man stumbled along with peering eyes, and slow, uncertain footsteps. Now we walk briskly towards our unknown goal. | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Stark Munro Letters | |
| It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven. | E. M. Forster | Howards End | |
| The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind. | Edgar Allan Poe | The Murders in the Rue Morgue | |
| "Indeed, I am very sorry to be right in this instance. I would much rather have been merry than wise." | Jane Austen | Emma | |
