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Intelligence must battle relentlessly against resisting what it discovers.
The intelligent man, like the artist, can only work with a limited number of themes. Each intelligence has its repertoire.
Intelligence without a costly counterpart is the rarest of gifts.
Wisdom consists in resigning oneself to the only thing possible without proclaiming it the only thing necessary.
The mediocre often adorn themselves in the external signs of genius.
Ideas are resold at all the stalls, but intelligence must be taken with you to the market.
A great intelligence ends up creating the truth of what it affirms.
Intelligence consists not in handling intelligent ideas, but in handling any idea intelligently.
An intelligence attracts us with its wit, but only seduces us with its naïveté.
Intelligence does not settle in synthesis, but in the tension of opposites.
The Christian footprint is the only guarantee of intellectual maturity.
Intelligence persists as long as it does not prefer its solutions to its problems.
A healthy intelligence demands that cynicism destroy childhood sentiments, but it also requires, when middle age strikes, for a broader and deeper understanding of things to destroy the insufficiency of cynicism.
A generous intelligence is perhaps even more rare than a great intelligence.
Genius is sometimes tiresome, but a finely educated soul is never boring.
Absolute solitude and nakedness before God are the only guarantees of intelligence.
Adult intellectual capital is usually the result of a small lottery won in adolescence.
Intelligence invented ritual to protect man from the sincerity of fools.
I am lacking in opinions. I only have short, transitory, fleeting ideas, more similar to the shabby inns where one rests for a night, than the splendid mansions where we aren’t sure if we live or if we are prisoners of their magnificence.
Intelligence is hard at work, precise, and true, only when it believes it has been summoned before a supreme tribunal.
No human intelligence can compare to that Olympian, serene, and sovereign intelligence of Thucydides.
When an intellectual climate is lacking in originality, its fruits only interest those who are directly affected.
Stupidity only surprises the stupid, and corruption the corrupt. The intelligent- much like the innocent- are not so easy to confuse.
Without winding passages and caverns, an intelligence has the insipid roundness of a pebble.
Let’s not pretend we are correct. Let us be content with an intelligent error.
The most presumptuous wisdom stands shamefaced before the soul drunk with love or hatred.
Only the disinfecting gaze of intelligence saves us from the purulence of life.
The ideas of the intelligent man are not out of order except when he harbors- possibly without realizing it- repugnant objectives.
Intellectual adventures are the only stories that do not soon seem tedious.
The intelligent man never lives in a mediocre environment, as a mediocre environment is one where there are no intelligent men.
Those who criticize erudition and culture, saying it stifles originality, no doubt label “original” anything inspired and influenced by a source of which they are ignorant.
The stupidities typical of a level of intelligence higher than our own usually seem, to us, to be distinguished revelations.
Even when it cannot be reasonable, a choice should be intelligent. Even when there are no demonstrably compelling choices, there are still stupid choices.
The waters that intelligence does not stir are pure, but have no taste.
In many cases, the individual must compromise, but his intelligence must never compromise.
In order to defend, intelligence must be alert on all bastions. To attack, all that is needed is an overlooked postern.
We want everything to be demonstrable, in order to reach the truth without needing to be intelligent.
Perhaps the search for an ethic is the difference between the cultivated man and the man who is merely educated, between the technically informed and the wise.
Without Latin or Greek, it is possible to teach the gestures of intelligence, but not intelligence itself.
An intelligent man is one who maintains his intelligence at a temperature independent of his environment.
Authentic intelligence can see even the most humble fact of daily life in light of a broader idea.
Only great intelligence can handle an easy subject without its very ease corrupting it. The difficulty of a subject, on the other hand, constrains the mediocre to a rigor that saves him.
In politics we should be wary even of intelligent optimism and trust in the fears of the fool.
The pragmatic man frowns, confused, when he hears intelligent ideas, trying to figure if what he hears is nonsense or impertinence.
A particle of common sense seems like genius in a woman.
The price intelligence charges its chosen ones is resignation to daily trivialities.
The quality of an intelligence depends less on what it understands than on what inspires it to smile.
It is always easier to have bold opinions than to be intelligent.
The two wings of intelligence are erudition and love.
Ages of intellectual babble not only precede, but also follow, those brief eras of perfectly clear intelligence.
The unexpected grace of an intelligent smile is enough to blow away the layers of tedium left by our days.
There are no ideas that expand intelligence, but there are ideas that contract it.
Great intelligences fashion in marble what the average intelligence copies in plaster.
When the race of egoists intent on perfecting themselves dies out, no one will remain to remind us that we have a duty to save our own intelligence, even after we have lost all hope of saving our own skin.
Hearing an intelligent opinion reconciles you with life.
Intelligence, in certain ages, must be devoted simply to restoring definitions.
Ideas soon age. Intelligence does not.
Intelligent men abound, but nothing is more rare than an interesting intelligence.
Intellectual independence has been achieved when it is not this or that opinion that dazzles us, but intelligence itself.
A single intellectual success can be what saves.
“Genius” is the ability to have the impact on our cold imagination such as any book could have when we were children.
The depth of some works can be deceptive. Since the waters are clear, the bottom seems close to the surface. Thus the true depth of a thought escapes us, and we attribute profundity to shallow ideas and their murky waters.
Intellectual wars are not won by the regular army but by snipers.
Philosophical intelligence lifts us toward a zone of clarity and ideas; literary intelligence immerses us in the pulp of evidence.
As intelligence increases, so does the list of that which is incomprehensible.
There are intelligences that simultaneously awaken our admiration and our disdain.
Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress, but hope in a miracle.
A narrow intelligence is forgiven its extravagances.
Agreement is eventually possible between intelligent men, because intelligence is a conviction they share.
Knowing only solves minor problems, but learning protects against tedium.
To be intelligent is to not require full proof in order to judge.
Every intelligence reaches a point where it thinks it is advancing, without taking a step.
For those of us who cannot hear intelligent ideas without emotion, the slackness with which others listen is astonishing.
A good education, an excellent memory, and the skillful use of rhetoric can succeed in imitating intelligence.
He who desires only intelligent friends is in danger of dying alone.
I am a caricature of great intelligence.
The emblem of the thinker is not the spinning wheel, but the harpoon.
It is through intelligence that grace rescues us from the worst ignominies.
Knowledge is based on intelligent suspicions, not incontrovertible certainties.
A resistant and aged intelligence does not consist of the inability of change ideas, but rather the inability to change the level at which we have them.
There is such a thing as intellectual gluttony.
There is an intelligence of the intellect, an intelligence of intelligence, and an intelligence of the whole person.
There are intelligences that feed our intelligence, and others that merely enrich it.
Two intelligent men do not contradict each other without secretly smiling.
Intelligence easily resigns, forgetting itself. Everyday cares, petty concerns, anything can rob us of our clarity, our vigilance. Without resistance we abandon ourselves to the interests of the day, forgetting that it is possible- that it is necessary, even essential- to carry on without neglecting our faculties, our gaze critical and ironic.
Note: Dávila was a Colombian political philosopher and in the Latin church. His aphorisms are presented here for the purposes of enjoyment, study, and historical record, but do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this writer. For more information on Dávila, see this introductory post. For information on how to live your life, go to church and read the Church Fathers/Saints.
Featured image: Manuscript from Dávila’s archives. source
